you’ve got mail

We–I mean all of us–used to send more mail; we had baskets of pre-selected cards and special pens, pretty stamps and seals.  We even went to parties to learn how to emboss and bought accessories to make art deliverable by post.  Despite our busy lives, Stampin Up is still a thing.  I checked.

Automatically, those go in the “keep” pile, the finger-pressed patchwork cards with their mats and uneven stamping.  “Oh, she made this,” I think, astounded, satisfied by the heft in my hand, by the subtle pungency of old glue.

I sit cross-legged on the floor in my closet, piles of old cards falling out of my lap, cascading onto the floor.  I need to vacuum, that much is obvious.  But it’s not time yet for sucking up the detritus; that can wait until I finish the project, which already has sent sneezy-soft fake fibers spinning through the air around my head.   A few minutes ago, I unearthed the “feather” pen that sat next to the guest book at our wedding and discovered that the pretender wasn’t constructed for longevity. And time, the sensitive thing, when gathered like a slow-grown paunch, takes a while to diminish.  All of these letters–the handwriting especially, with it’s loops and curves (Is it tight and trembling or loose and expansive; angular or childish or artsy?); all of these letters take the shape of history.  I have filled my lap with relationships and culture and pilgrimage until life spills over my legs.

I open and close the card on top of the tumble, quickly consigning it to recycle.  You can’t be lazy about these decisions.  This one has just a signature inside, not even words underlined in the poetry as if to say, see, this is what I want you to know.   We love an aunt who marked cards this way, the trembling line of her pen traveling under certain words and phrases as though she claimed them.  Some phrases, clearly the most emphatic, she lined doubly.  Sometimes, she etched exclamation points beside the words, pressing down so hard the paper is dented.  This. This. THIS.  If I touch the dents with my fingers, it’s like touching her hand.  I have kept every one of those cards because when I read them, I can hear her voice.  I can see her long fingers, the practical, efficient way she tucked her hair behind her ears and bent over to emphasize.  She was an emphatic person.  She’s gone on now without us, but her letters stayed behind.  I say we love her–yes, presently–because we still do, just from a different dimension.  I am certain she still loves us.

But this card, the one I’ve just tossed away, made no similar impression.  In fact, I held it a second too long trying to conjure something just from the name–a common, unspecific name–plopped just below the printed text beside a garish tree.  This tree supposedly depicts the residence of Winnie the Pooh, though I thought he had softer digs.  It’s a card for a new mother; I think maybe it came when Riley arrived, which would explain my sentimentality.  The weight in my palm feels unremarkable and leaves me with no imagination for someone standing in front of a card rack smiling, suddenly embarrassed by an audience of other shoppers, tapping the front with an approving thumb.  No.  No imagination at all.

The next one, though, this one makes me gasp.  I slide it open and immediately recognize a page and a half of Kevin’s mother’s handwriting, patiently winding its way through time, unfaded, as though she wrote it yesterday.  Of course, I know better.  Her pilgrimage here ended nearly ten years ago; it’s been that long since her smile lit this place.  But the letter reshapes her petite frame, her delicate, precise hands.  She used say real things until the moment right before her tears fell and then swat the air with her hand, the same hand she used to slide off her slipper and affectionately swat at her boys; the same hand she used to write this letter.

I scoop the abundant pile out of my lap, these memories huddled like children, and walk downstairs, past lines and lines of cards Riley has assembled for our family to sign.  Below each card, Riley has pressed sticky notes, blue like flags, bearing delivery dates and pertinent details for her brother.  The rest of us lift the cards, holding the offered pen in one hand, blinking at the addresses Riley has carefully penned on the envelopes below.  But for Adam, she leaves the notes.  On my way past, it makes me smile that someone who once struggled so much to speak should now pour herself out this way, should now teach her brother why he loves enough to compose.  It’s as though she knows the significance of the writing, even without the ability to converse about it.  It’s as though Riley knows, just deep in her soul, the way sentences and paragraphs construct a way to travel beyond time.

Kevin’s mom referred to herself as my mom-in-love; it was a phrase she borrowed from a favorite author, because we were sealed in relationship by love, not just by something so easily undone as the law.  When I find Kevin in the kitchen, I feel his mom’s thin arm around my shoulders; I hear her blithely call me “little E.”  The day I carry the card–I carry her–to Kevin is the day before Mother’s Day.  On the delicate cream-colored paper, she writes–yes, presently and in her own hand, which is as distinct as a fingerprint–about how much she loves her son and specifically why.  She tells Kevin–yes, still–the things she admires in him.  Placing that card in his hands feels like reaching into eternity and rejoining their hands.  I watch my husband smile, watch him gently run his hand across the page.  “Well,” he says, looking up at me, “how about that.”  His expression, of course, says more.

They say the things we post online will live forever; they say it with warning, encouraging caution.  Social media permanence, as they call it, has begun to replace other forms of communication.  But will our posture in front of some computer or the way we divide attention with a device in one hand ever replace the angle of a pen in our hands; or a well-thought, double-underlined sentiment; or the way we make letters with our own fingers?  I met an author recently who still writes out his books by hand; perhaps this is why: Despite the mind-blowing boom of technology,  I still believe that only people live forever, and that only the handwritten parts of us still breathe long after our bodies stop.  Our memories fade much faster than these real words written on paper, resounding with our voices, re-fleshing the bones of our hands.  Indeed, in our correspondence we encapsulate love, to keep our beloveds company until they travel beyond the veil of impermanence.

So on my way back up to the witnesses crowding in my closet, I pause beside the rows of Riley’s cards, lifting one to blink at the envelope below, picking up the pen.  What is it that I really want to say?  What message can I write through time that will build where something else has broken?  Whatever the words, they will be deliberate.