The letters that brought them together

Every Friday, Rose listened for the mailman.

Tom’s letters arrived in thin envelopes, sometimes creased at the corners. She opened them carefully with a kitchen knife and read them standing up. Then she sat down and read them again.

He wrote about ordinary things. A meal he wished she could have tasted. A friend who snored. A cold morning when he couldn’t get his hands warm. He asked after her mother and wanted to know whether the back step had been fixed.

Rose told him about her days, too. Work, the garden, a ruined cake. She tried to make him laugh. 

She kept every letter.

Growing up, we knew where the box was kept, but we rarely saw it open. It belonged to Grandma in the same unquestioned way as her wedding ring or the chair beside the window.

One afternoon, I asked her about it.

She brought it to the table and lifted the lid. There were the letters, still in their envelopes, along with the photograph I had never seen.

“Grandpa wrote all of these?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “He was much more talkative on paper.”

She let me choose one. I struggled with his handwriting. She helped with a word here and there, though I began to suspect she remembered whole sentences.

I asked if I could read another.

We stayed at the table until the light began to fade.

Before putting everything away, she held the photograph for a moment and smiled. Then she tucked it beside the letters and closed the lid.

Now the box is with us. We’ve kept the envelopes in the order she left them. When we take a letter out, we unfold it carefully along those same familiar creases.

I’m glad I asked her to open it that afternoon. There are things in these pages I would never have thought to ask—and a side of Grandpa I might never have known.

Rose and Tom Hall were my grandparents.