Grandmother’s Letters and the Meaning of Time

The day I discovered my grandmother’s letters, I’d driven 10 hours. I drove half the way, and my traveling companion — my husband — drove the other half.

I’ve always liked the timeless, nostalgic feeling of being between one place and another. Of gazing out the window at small dusty towns and wondering what people’s lives might be like there. Or stopping for BLTs in nondescript diners. Sometimes, if the weather is nice, we’ll take lunch to a picnic table we know overlooking an empty field. It’s pleasant, the stillness, against a backdrop of birds and big rigs flying by.

But this time I realized I’d spent most of that day’s drive, that rare, meditative time, on my phone. Rather than relishing being here nor there, I’d been glued to distraction. Texting. Scrolling social media. Checking email. Opening the door to our apartment, I felt not only road-weary but wired.

I sighed and sorted through mail strewn on the front hall table. Bills. Catalogues. And then, a piece of actual handwritten correspondence.

My heart lifted. Snail mail!

Someone had taken the time to post a long, thin, manila envelope sporting an iridescent Eclipse stamp and two floral Forever stamps. The envelope was hand-addressed in a vaguely familiar script. What could it be?  The return address: Ferndale, California, a tidy Victorian town where my first boss, a magnetic magazine editor in New York City, now lives. I’d landed that job the old-fashioned way: My grandmother had been best friends with her aunt. They’d both lived in Ferndale forever.

A green index card slid from the envelope, along with a stack of correspondence. Hello, Kim! it read. Here is the “first batch,” there may be more — the pit seems bottomless — but thought these were treasures. Love, W.

I was intrigued. My first boss, Wendy, had inherited her aunt’s small farm on the Northern California coast — along with everything in it. I wondered if she was downsizing. Sifting through lifetimes of boxes? Either way, in our era of digital efficiency, what emerged from the envelope seemed wondrous: three faded postcards. Two letters. A handful of recipes. My grandmother touched these, I thought, running my fingers over a recipe card.

I picked up the first postcard and beheld my grandmother’s navy-blue ballpoint handwriting. But more, I beheld … her! Her voice. My grandmother’s personality leaped off a postcard she wrote 50 years ago, in 1972, as if she were standing right next to me:

Dear Hazel & George,

You have been our most faithful correspondents and we’ve loved your letters. “Sunny, warm Humboldt” [a joke, as it always rains in Northern California] sounds especially good as we’ve had rain in Athens! But the sightseeing was worth it. The historical ruins back to 5,000 B.C. were a revelation to us. They even had intricate jewelry, tweezers, safety pins, etc! Cruise delightful with interesting couples from Florida and Brazil. Love Copenhagen but cold!

Love, A & C

It was just paper, but it brought so much joy. I sat down at my kitchen counter and read every piece at once. Re-energized, it was all I could talk about that night: my grandmother’s postcards! Her recipes! Her letters from 50 years ago, when she was in her mid-60s, like me.

What is it about writing and receiving a handwritten letter, I wondered. Is it the paper? The penmanship? The stamps? The more I thought about it, I realized, no: The power of a handwritten note is how it makes you feel. Though much has been written about the death of snail mail, no email, text, or tweet could have delighted me as much as the rare pleasure of this unexpected ephemera. Each piece was a paper time capsule, a window into the past, a reminder of the passage of time.

I studied the postcards. I had no idea my grandparents had taken a cruise to Copenhagen and Portugal. They’d rounded the Straits of Magellan and gone to Machu Picchu?

I gently unfolded the condolence letters penned to Hazel after her husband suddenly died, taking in the soft curves of my grandmother’s words. One letter sports a pale pink border and a watercolor of an impossibly tiny fly, with pink wings and boots, ha!, riding a big green cricket. Even in unimaginable grief, there is still hope, the whimsical stationery seems to say.

I read the recipe cards: one for something called “Feather Frosting,” made from canned pineapple, corn starch, cream, and an entire cup of sugar.

A recipe for vodka gimlets. My grandmother drank vodka gimlets?

And most iconic of all, her mother’s bread recipe.

My grandmother Aileen baked her own bread, even when she could have easily bought it. Why did she continue this hours-long ritual — kneading the dough, letting it rise — even widowed in her 80s, I wondered.

Regarding the bread recipe: As I read the recipe, I realized that baking and writing are both meditative acts. The kneading of the bread; the writing of the words. The smell of the yeast; the scent of the paper. The slowing down of time by intentionally taking the time to do something by hand.

In the ease and connectivity of our modern lives, where emails fly through cyberspace and texts and tweets round the world at lightspeed, letters take time. I thought about how special it is to receive a handwritten thank you from my niece, a birthday card from a girlfriend, a letter from my parents, my mother’s rounded handwriting now spidery.

Indeed, each envelope is an invitation to treasure the passage of time. The kind of opportune moment the ancient Greeks called Kairos time. Deep time. Even thinking of my grandmother’s letters now, a month later, reminds me to stop and breathe — to recognize the experience of being.

Technology has made us masters of speed and efficiency, but instant isn’t everything. I’m not advocating for the return of pigeon post or the Pony Express (which were both pretty remarkable when you consider them), but the day I received my grandmother’s letters, I understood that by worshipping convenience, we run the risk of losing meaning and depth. Would you rather leave your grandkids your laptop full of emails? Your iPhone clogged with photos? Or a thin stack of handwritten correspondence?

Next July marks 250 years since Benjamin Franklin was appointed our country’s first Postmaster General in 1775. (During the Revolutionary War, when there wasn’t phone or telegraph for instantaneous communication, mail transported by horseback riders on rough roads held the colonies together.) When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831, the U.S. had twice as many post offices as Britain and five times as many as France. He wrote of hurtling through the frontier in a crude wagon simply called “the mail” and pausing at “huts” where the driver would toss down a bundle of letters. After reaching a peak in 2006, U.S. mail volume has declined every year since — except for parcel delivery, which exploded with online retailing. Even more striking, first-class USPS mail volume dropped 53 percent between 2000 and 2022.

These days, most of us have sacrificed our penmanship to keyboards and are even outsourcing our thoughts to A.I. You can send an email for free, while the cost of a Forever stamp is poised to rise again in July — to 73 cents from the current 68 cents. But the most enduring thing about handwritten letters is that they are handwritten. As Elspeth Penny notes in her charming TEDx talk about the lost art of letter-writing, writing letters by hand makes them perfect, because they have not been perfected.

My grandparents were people who, in my memory, seemed to have time for everyone. They were never rushed. When you were with them, you were the center of their attention. No one ever checked their watch. Certainly not their phones — they didn’t exist! They managed to retain small-town values somehow, even when they moved to Southern California with its booming population. They appreciated small pleasures: toast made from homemade bread. Walter Cronkite. A game of golf. Growing lemons and avocados on their own trees. Being able to tell a clever joke. To tie a bow tie. To welcome people into their home warmly, as if every friend of yours was family.

They never set foot in a gym, as far as I know, but they enjoyed a cocktail every night. My grandmother lived to be 96.

Re-reading her letters, saved by her best friend, sent to me by her best friend’s niece — my first boss 40 years ago — seems like a profound mystery. A simple gift of time and intention that even now I don’t fully comprehend.

I put down my phone. I pick up a pen.

I sit down and write my first boss. I find just the right stamp. She will be surprised to hear from me. (If she can even read my messy handwriting.)

What next, I wonder. Bread? And I smile.

 

Kim Brown Seely is the author of the memoir Uncharted: A Couple’s Epic Empty-Nest Adventure Sailing from One Life to Another. Her writing has appeared in Travel + Leisure, National Geographic, Town & Country, Virtuoso Travel & Life, Sunset, and Outside, among others.

This article is featured in the September/October 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.