SAVING LETTERS

I never considered myself a good descriptive writer, but I loved to write letters. Writing letters was always an outlet for me, though I didn’t always recognize it as such. Now that we have email (and blogs), writing takes a different form, but it’s still writing. Thank goodness it’s faster.

My mother didn’t save letters beyond their time of current interest and encouraged me not to keep mine. I think she felt that personal letters share timely information and when that time passes, you run certain risks of misunderstandings developing or maybe even confidences revealed. Maybe she learned that through a bad experience. I don’t know. Consequently I have very little in the way of written material / history from my mother’s side of the family, no words written by my Grandmother Portfors (except for recipes), and only a very few letters written by my mother herself. Amongst my memorabilia someplace are the letters Chris and I exchanged in which we copied the writing style of Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte one summer (1962 or 1963, I suppose), when she was at Canyon Ranger Station with her family.

My dad’s family – now that’s another matter. I have a number of different collections of handwritten correspondence. I am now transcribing Grandma Ina’s letters addressed mostly to my dad, making that process a part of my everyday routine. I’ve wrestled a lot with the issues presented by these letters. They do reveal character, debt, disappointment, and even anguish. If I had been my dad I probably wouldn’t have kept some of those written scoldings for someone else to see.

Even so, all of those players are gone now. Times have changed, and the letters tell so many wonderful things about how people lived and managed their lives. For instance, when I hear that in 1933 farmers struggled to find a market for their crops, it’s an objective statement. But when I read in Jack’s own hand: “I haven’t found a market for the [railroad] car of beans yet. It don’t look like we are going to sell them at all. I have about 27 tons.” -- well, it touches my heart.