Letter from Tacoma, Washington Arrives Twice in Lawrence, Kansas

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A total stranger in Chappaqua, New York, who collects and sells stamps, came across a letter that my mother wrote in 1949. With only my grandmother’s name and address in Lawrence, Kansas, from 70 years earlier, he tracked me down and sent it to me. I stared at the letter-within-a-letter in my hands, with puzzlement merging into amazement.

Where has this letter been since it left my grandmother’s house?

Two-and-a-half typewritten pages, the letter yields snippets of daily life at the college in the Pacific Northwest where my mother was a graduate student at the time.

A montage of minutiae, these are the mundane details, in her chosen order, that my mother wrote about, reflecting interests that she shared with her mother:

• the local newspaper from the Colorado town where my grandmother spent the summer

• the procurement of a Coca-Cola bottle opener from an obliging deliveryman

• a chance encounter with an acquaintance from back home

• cartoons from a Kansas newspaper clipped and posted on a bulletin board at the college

• a House Beautiful magazine subscription

• baskets and perfume flasks purchased from her Uncle Earl

• reservations for her upcoming trip to Alaska with her friend Ethel

• her friend Ruby’s visit and invitation for a reciprocal visit

• Ethel’s photographs taken for her boyfriend Bob, “the boy she is pinned to”

• taking a “sun bath”

• attending a sorority officer installation, a senior farewell ceremony, and a fraternity fireside

• payments on her life membership in her undergraduate college alumni association

• a Benadryl prescription

• the decision not to buy a nylon slip

• paying a department store bill

• her plan to store her trunk at the dorm until her return from the Alaska trip

This is definitely the mother I grew up with, but a younger version. She sports here her signature train of thought that is not exactly linear…always engaging in a juxtaposition of topics, pedestrian details of everyday life that, to the outside observer, would hardly merit articulation. However, within the intimacy of mother and daughter, the only living members of their nuclear family for the preceding 11 years, such details do merit mention, and even exposition.

Thought the other day how much we or maybe it’s just me, anyway, how we liked the Coca-Cola bottle opener in the kitchen. I thought that if I saw the Coca-Cola man around, which I never do, I would ask him to bring one back the next week. The next day he came, I saw him and asked him about them and he said he had one in the truck and brought it in. So now I have a bottle opener for us.

Almost bought you an irregular nylon slip today for $3.39 but they had none long enough, just regular length and that isn’t long enough.

I was telling someone how good Benidril is for colds and hay fever and looked in the bottle to get some and all of the capsules were gone. Would you get the prescription from Dr. Holmes and get it filled again. It was 1947 that I got it — in June I think.

How did this seventy-plus-year-old letter get from Lawrence, Kansas, to Chappaqua, New York? Why did it ever leave the house of the original recipient? (My grandmother held onto everything, and she bequeathed this inclination to my mother.) Perhaps the letter fell into other hands totally by accident… it could have been used as a bookmark in a book that was later lent out and never returned.

Tonight we were walking to the sub for dinner and I saw this fellow that looked like someone I knew and then I saw the Kansas license plate. I yelled and he stopped; it was Warren H., the one who was in Japan with McArthur. Married Kathleen R.; it was her sister we squirted water on the day we played hookey. He was out looking for his dog. Coincidences.

Coincidences. My mother added that specific word by hand, in a letter that she had typed. She had read over her letter and penned that one-word sentence comment about running into Warren H., so far from home: coincidences.

Suddenly a soft-voiced, unwelcome thought nags at me. A few years ago, after my mother’s death, I found a stack of similar letters, also written by my mother to my grandmother in the same time period, in a drawer of my mother’s desk. I read all of those letters because even though I was making an effort to divest myself of items from my mother’s estate, I wanted to be well acquainted with exactly what I was getting rid of. It was a matter of respect for the survival of these items to the present day. Even if a previous generation had perhaps compulsively saved a stack of letters, I would take the responsibility and be the reflective, decision-making generation. Ultimately, I offered these letters as a donation to the archives of the college, because the letters gave word-snapshots of various activities taking place there in the late 1940s. The university archivist enthusiastically accepted my offer. This pleased me because the letters’ continued existence would have a purpose, and they would not be stored in my house, awaiting my adult children’s handling.

Could it be that this letter was in that stack and that the archivist decided to sell it—and perhaps others—because of the value of its stamp? It is possible… I didn’t keep a copy of the letters donated, so there is no way I can know. I inquired about the provenance to my beneficent stranger in New York, and he responded that there were no other letters from Kansas or Washington in the packet of envelopes he purchased from an unmentioned seller. If indeed the archivist ultimately decided to sell this letter for the value of its stamp, I hold no grudge because the content of this individual letter had little to do with the college. I do hope that at least some of the other letters were deemed worthy of remaining in the archives. I know that when I donated the letters I signed an agreement that the archives could determine what happened to them in the future.

Coincidences. The unwelcome thought that nags at me is that this letter in my hands might not be a special errant one rescued from strangers and delivered to me as a serendipitous gift of nostalgia evoking my long-gone foremothers. Instead, it might be a letter I read in the past and consciously decided that I never needed to see again. That it had a better home than the shredder, and that I would identify that home, and the new owner would treasure it for its unique qualities of content. It may be that the new owner I found treasured it for its monetary value. That is not a bad thing if the money it brought contributed in some tiny way to the mission of the university that sold it. This was an outcome whose possibility I willingly agreed to at the time of the donation.

Regardless of how the letter came into the hands of the New York stamp merchant, his gesture in tracking me down and sending me the letter is of unsullied generosity of time and effort, showing a kindred passion for sheaves of letter-paper with lines written by a loved one long ago.

I look again at the list of the letter’s topics, and I play around with their ordering, imposing my logic on my mother’s apparent lack of organizing principles:


PUBLICATIONS

The local newspaper from the Colorado town where my grandmother spent the summer

Cartoons from a Kansas newspaper clipped and posted on a bulletin board at the college

A House Beautiful magazine subscription

THE MATERIAL WORLD

The procurement of a Coca-Cola bottle opener from an obliging deliveryman

Baskets and perfume flasks purchased from her Uncle Earl

THE SOCIAL WORLD

Attending a sorority officer installation, a senior farewell ceremony, and a fraternity fireside

Her friend Ruby’s visit and invitation for a reciprocal visit

Ethel’s photographs taken for her boyfriend Bob, “the boy she is pinned to”

LIFE BACK HOME

A chance encounter with an acquaintance from back home

Payments on her life membership in her undergraduate college alumni association

THE BODY

Taking a “sun bath”

A Benadryl prescription

FINANCE

The decision not to buy a nylon slip

Paying a department store bill

TRAVEL

Reservations for her upcoming trip to Alaska with her friend Ethel

Her plan to store her trunk at the dorm until her return from the Alaska trip


I stop here and sit back. What have I just done? I’ve started to analyze my mother’s letter. On the one hand, that seems odd. On the other hand, I have found that the categories here actually match the aspects of living that occupied the mother I knew years after this letter was written. Now I’m sufficiently satisfied with that analytic exercise, and ready to back away from it to consider again her letter as an integral artifact from the past, in its entirely, not in its parts.

So now I simply hold the letter and lightly rub its thin, stiff paper between my fingers and thumbs. I’ll never know for certain the whereabouts of this letter after it left Lawrence, Kansas, sometime after May 20, 1949, and before it arrived in Chappaqua, New York, sometime before January 4, 2020. The impossibility of knowing makes the mystery deliciously attractive. That mystery, an absence of knowing, is outdone by the presence of the physical letter itself, the yellowed stationery from the Olympic Hotel in Seattle, which I hold in both hands. I can touch the blue ink where my mother wrote “Love lots, Sally,” in a loopy, deeply familiar script.

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After a career of teaching Spanish, Rosalea has turned to writing, as she sorts through 3 generations of stashed papers and forgotten objects in the 19th-century house she grew up in and where she lives now.

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