Arts & Letters

Finding that handwritten note from my mother was like a resurrection. My brother Frank and I were in the bedroom of her house the day after she died, sorting through all the stuff. I pulled open the top drawer to the dresser she’d had since we were kids, the one she’d moved across the country just once.

I found a book tucked in between some scarves, one of the mystery novels we’d passed back and forth between us. I pulled it out and looked at the cover and smiled. I cracked it open and a slip of paper fell out and landed on my foot. Setting the book on the dresser, I leaned over to grab it. Frank saw me staring at it.

“What’s that, Shar?” he asked.

My name is Sharleigh, but Frank never called me by my full name just like I never, ever called him Francis. I turned slowly to look over my shoulder. He was standing at the closet, taking clothes out and putting them into different piles.

“A note. In mom’s handwriting. To me. But I don’t really understand it and I don’t remember ever reading it before. Maybe I never actually got it,” I said.

Frank was holding one of mom’s dress shirts on a hanger and set it back into the closet and walked over to me.

“Can I see?” he said.

He was always so aware of my special bond with mom, you know how mothers and daughters can be, and he never pretended to have the same kind of relationship with her that I had.

“Sure,” I said, handing it to him. “I don’t have a clue what she’s talking about, though.”

Frank looked at the note and shook his head.

“I’m equally clueless.”

He handed the note back to me and picked up the book from the dresser.

“Do you remember reading this book? Sharing it with her, I mean?” he asked. “Does the note maybe have something to do with the story?”

I took the book out of his hand and opened it to the first pages.

“Sure, I remember the book. I don’t really remember talking with her about it but, you know, we shared tons of books over the years. If this held special meaning, I think I would have known,” I said.

I put the book back on the dresser. I didn’t think the note had anything to do with that story. It was something having to do with our story. Me and her. I read the note again and shook my head.

“The mystery tucked inside a mystery, huh!” he said.

I shrugged and put the note back in the book and slid it into my daypack. I’d have to come back to it later.

“When you’re done with mom’s clothes, there’s a big box up there on the closet shelf we need to get down and go through,” I said.

“Yup,” Frank said, resuming his clothes-sorting duties. He’d noticed it too.

. . .

After pulling the box down, Frank and I sat cross-legged on the floor with it. He pulled the cardboard flaps back and opened it up to full view. We had found a mother lode. Struck nostalgic gold. There must have been decades of letters and notes and a few pictures in there, in a jumbled but orderly pile. Quiet chaos. Of a life we knew very little about, apparently.

Frank pulled out a letter that was sitting near the top addressed to mom from me. As Frank read aloud, I remembered the day I wrote it to her, telling her about my new job. I leaned in close to look at it. It was typed on a computer with only my signature penned at the bottom. Mom hated the computer. Thought it was killing the art of letter writing, a thing she put her heart and soul into.

I contemplated the flaws of a handwritten letter—the impatient scribbles, the slashing of T’s, frenetic scratching out—all the tell-tale signs of rethinking a thing. Evidence of our unique imperfections. A handwritten letter tells no lies, I thought. As Frank was putting the letter back in its envelope, I thought out loud.

“It’s art. Mom was making marks on paper the same way I do with my paintbrush on canvas,” I said. “It’s so primal.”

“I know, uncovering these letters is so real. We’re archaeologists on a dig, for heck’s sake! Her whole legacy is here. This box even smells like her,” Frank said.

I leaned in for a sniff. He was right. It was her in that cardboard box, alright. I peered in, to the layers of paper in various stages of self-preservation or decay. Most of my life these days was compiled into documents and files on my laptop, shorthand texts on my phone. Absent of any specific real person, place or thing.

I picked out an envelope from the box with a Paris postmark, from me to mom from years ago in one of those airy, pale blue par avion envelopes. It smelled like Paris. It had a texture to it, a life of its own from traveling miles to get into my mom’s hands.

I slipped my fingers in and pulled out the letter, sending a rush of memories across my brain. I uncreased the two folds in the letter and flattened it out.

“I had just arrived!” I said to Frank, after reading the first paragraph to myself.

“I was sharing a room with a writer, this guy named Marc who I met in front of a crepe stand in the French Quarter,” I said, enchanted by the memory.

I went silent again, reading.

“Why do you think she kept this stuff?” Frank asked, sifting through another pile.

I set the letter down.

“I think they were place-markers,” I said. “She’d get a letter from one of us. She’d read it, bask in it, then find a place for it, a place she could return to over and over again.”

Resuming my letter, I could really visualize myself in Paris. So young. Excited. Years before all the heaviness of a difficult marriage would take over that I would eventually fly away from. It was so visceral, tangible, so sensual. I handed the letter to Frank with a sigh.

“Damn, your handwriting looks so different. Look at the way you made all these big, flowery loops and made hearts instead of dots over your i’s,” he said. We laughed about it as we parsed each sentence. How clearly it revealed my blissful state of mind. I was in Paris, after all, I joked.

“So much energy coming through those words,” he said. “You know, I read that in Europe they still accept only handwritten résumés from job applicants. It helps access the person’s character more clearly.”

I nodded. A personality is revealed through the way a person crosses a t, the weight of the hand as the pen presses down, the urgency or the joy or the sadness seeps out. It can tell you an age, a mood in that moment, the intention behind the words. It’s such an oddly, peculiar and intimate thing.

“Mom wrote me letters up until her last days and I only have a handful of them. Certainly nothing like this,” I said, waving my hand over the box.

“Ah. The consequences of life as a vagabond. I guess we kept shedding a little bit more each day,” Frank said.

“Who does this? I mean, getting a handwritten letter these days is akin to finding a payphone on a street corner. Or . . . or making home baked bread. It’s of another era,” I said.

Frank agreed.

“I know. It’s what kept her connected to her past and her present. It was a beautiful thing to find one of her letters with all the junk mail and the bills. I’m gonna miss that,” he said.

“Yep.”

Then Frank found a letter mom had written to dad, just as she packed us up in the station wagon to drive west.

“Wait. How does she have this, do ya think?” Frank asked, just as I was thinking it.

I took the letter from Frank. It smelled like our old house on Madison. I looked at her handwriting and it brought me right back to those days. It was a true artifact, a treasure unburied.

“I have a feeling mom wrote this letter more than once before she finally settled on the right words to say,” I said, the insight hitting to the core of my own experience. “This one might have been softer. Or harsher. Or not quite the truth. Or maybe closer to the truth,” I said.

I read the letter aloud. I felt her pain, yet her freedom was peeking out between the lines. Frank felt it, too, I could tell.

We came across some really old letters on paper turning various shades of yellow. Frank carefully unfolded a crepe-y one, a letter from our great grandmother Ina to her husband Thaddeus telling him she was leaving him to join the circus as an acrobat and singer.

Frank let out a big guffaw, incredulous with the uncovering of such ancient history. I, myself, was beginning to feel a common thread stitched through the women in our family leaving their men for something more. I felt a tug at my heart, an undefinable longing and shared sorrow.

Frank rummaged through the box and uncovered something else. A stack of letters, tied up neatly with a red ribbon, you know, the kind of ribbon you use to wrap up a Christmas present. He looked at me.

“You wanna take this one?” he asked.

“Ok,” I said. “But I feel like we’re invading her privacy. Should we really?”

“She left the box, didn’t she? She had to know we’d find it,” he said.

I sat looking at Frank a minute, but I admit, I was curious too. I pulled the ribbon undone and let it fall into my lap. There were several letters from someone named Sam, love letters to mom. I read the first one aloud and then got sort of embarrassed and asked him again, should we be doing this? He nodded and winked, urging me on.

I opened another, then another, it was like candy, I couldn’t stop myself—the intimacy, the absolute, langourous lust and passion in them. The handwriting so perfected, so carefully gorgeous. A fourth one was a little different and we realized they weren’t in chronological order.

This one was signed Samantha yet clearly penned by the same person. We sat comparing the handwriting and it was identical, there was no mistaking it. We looked at each other and Frank furrowed his brow, waiting for me to say something. I was speechless.

I put it back in its envelope and tied them all neatly back together again. Set them down gently inside the box.

I stood up, overwhelmed, and walked over to my daypack and pulled out the book, reached for the note. It just didn’t make any sense. Like trying to decipher hieroglyphics. Did I know what it meant at the time? How could I not remember it now? Did I ever receive it—maybe that was why it was such a mystery. I turned to see Frank sifting through the box like a kid.

“How about those beers,” I said.

He nodded and put his hand up to gesture, in a minute. I walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge and grabbed the two bottles he had brought over saying we were probably gonna need ‘em today. I set them on the kitchen table and went looking for a bottle opener.

I opened a few drawers and found one, sitting atop a cloth folio with a snap closure. I jammed the opener into my jeans pocket and pulled out the folio to open it. It held three of mom’s favorite stationery papers inside along with a ruled white writing tablet, some stamps and four, expensive looking black ink pens. Her sacred letter writing paraphernalia.

Frank walked into the kitchen then and set something down on the table.

“Wait til ya get a load of this!” he said.

I closed up the folio, leaving it on the counter, pulled the opener out of my pocket and pulled out a chair and sat down. As I opened each of our beers, Frank slid a postcard across the table with his index finger.

I picked it up as I took a swig off my beer, turned it around and started to read. It was from mom’s brother Cal, short for Calvin, announcing his impending visit for a week one summer. I remembered it was unusually hot the week he came and that I was fourteen and Frank had just turned twelve.

“Now, check this out,” Frank said, using one finger again to slide a two-page letter across the table. Using that same finger, he tapped loudly at the letterhead of the paper.

“I always knew that guy was bad news!” Frank said, with a snort.

The letterhead was from the State Penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois.

“Does it say what he was in for?” I asked Frank, looking up from the letter.

Frank was shaking his head No as he took a pull from his beer. My eyes returned to the letter. There wasn’t much there in his wobbly, childlike scrawl. Mostly what seemed like a sad, repentant missive to mom with lots of misspellings, whole words darkly scribbled over and replaced with other words. I turned it over onto the table to reveal page two that had nested beneath. It was a hand-sketched self-portrait, and a pretty darn good one at that.

“Well, now ya know where you get your talent from!” Frank teased.

“Yeah, well, maybe. At least I didn’t get whatever other gene he had that put him in the Pen,” I said, and Frank snorted again.

I put the two pages together and pushed them aside.

“Do you remember that week he came to visit?” I asked. The visit that was clearly bookmarked by two very different edges of Uncle Cal’s life.

“Of course!” he said. “How could I forget it! He tried teaching me how to play 500 Miles on the banjo, remember? He was so agitated that I couldn’t get it and stomped out of the room. Then he took me out to the garage and tried to teach me how to box. Again, a miserable failure. At the time, I remember thinking he was just this short of punching me out over the banjo thing and taking me out to the garage was just a way to play his frustration out in his head. I dunno.”

“Maybe he was just trying to impose some male influence. Who knows,” I said. “We obviously don’t know a thing about who he really was.”

Frank just rolled his eyes and took another chug of beer. I followed suit.

“And Sam? The things you don’t know about people, geeeezus,” he said.

“Why do ya suppose mom kept that box of letters in the back of her closet all these years and never said word one about it? All the things we’ll never really know about her, now. It’s kind of a shame.”

“Yeah. Talk about skeletons in the closet. Literally!” I said, and we clinked our beers together and laughed. A kind of nervous, perplexed laugh, though.

“Damn, think about all the stuff we never knew about dad, either. Just dust in the wind, now,” Frank said.

“Unless we find a letter from him in that box!” I said.

. . .

But it was getting time to pack up some things in the car and make a Salvation Army drop. It was late in the day and we were both emotionally exhausted by our “dig.” After making a few trips back and forth from Frank’s pick-up to the house, piling up bags of stuff in the back of the truck, we lingered on the sidewalk. 

“I’ll lock up,” I said. “I gotta go back in and get a couple things.”

We hugged and made a plan to meet back at the house the next day.

“Bring more than two beers next time,” I yelled from the front lawn as Frank was climbing into the driver’s seat. He honked his horn in agreement and pulled away from the curb.

As I entered the house all alone, a different kind of feeling came over me. I sauntered into the bedroom and grabbed my daypack and slung it over my shoulder. I walked into the kitchen and set my pack on a chair. I reached for mom’s special folio and held it in both hands against my chest.

It was like she was in the room with me. I could see her visage, sitting at her kitchen table. Her folio spread out. Cup of coffee off to the side. The radio on, maybe. She would have sat immersed in her private world, writing out her most deeply personal feelings.

Loops and swirls and dots and exclamation points gliding across the paper. Her hand pirouetting, dipping and swaying side-to-side in a dance of revelation and truth. There she would sit, leaning in to deftly compose yet another letter—to me or Frank or who knows who. Sam? Dad? Her brother Cal?

I tucked the folio into my pack next to the book I’d found with the cryptic note tucked inside for further inspection. Introspection. I tucked the folio into my pack next to the book, I stood still letting it all sink in.

I’m thinking, maybe I’ll pick up where mom left off, now that I have her special paper and pens. The tools of her craft. Take up the mantle of an old art. Make it my own while carrying on a heartfelt tradition. Yep. I think I just might give it a whirl.