Dear Readers,
I’ve been reading lots of letters, and it leaves me wondering what we’re saying to each other. I can’t help but compare contemporary exchanges — largely on our phones — with the papers people are giving me.
My great aunt’s family and Minnie’s have shared letters with me. At first, I could not touch these treasures. Here was the past! My very own bits of gold. But it scared me, too. Would I be disappointed when the act of reading didn’t bring people back to life?
Finally, I conquered my fear and have begun reading. What I have is mundane, in the best way. Reports of the weather, professions of love, thanks for pictures and lots of basic logistical details: we are passing through on Thursday, can we stay with you? If it’s any bother, we’ll get a motel. And we saw ____ and ____, they are fine. Marriages, illnesses, hospitalizations, deaths. Notes dashed off on the way to mass, and the task of letter writing mentioned itself. “I have to write my letters,” my great aunt wrote to one of her daughters, begging to be forgiven for the brevity of this particular one. Long distance calls were very expensive and reserved for emergencies. People stayed in touch by writing.
Some of my great-aunt’s letters were written 70 years ago, but just two and a half blocks away from me. Thinking of her walking my neighborhood, our neighborhood, well, that feels as beautiful as the idea of falling snow.
Sifting through these papers, I’m not sure what I’m looking for. Personality? Facts? I think I want context, same as when I look at old magazines and cookbooklets. In that case, I study the recipes and ads to see what words and ideas were circulating. What can the food tell us about life, and relationships? About obligations? In these personal letters I get snippets of slang, and scant mentions of meals. Mostly, I’m witnessing the love people had for each other, a need to keep each other up to date. Is that flowing between us now, in texts and comment threads on social media?
In another future, say, 70 years from now, will people be communicating in an even more ephemeral fashion, just blinking eyes across continents to say hello, running our inner monologues on some kind of family channel that distributes our thoughts via microchips? In that time, will people savor whatever scraps of our current exchanges remain? Will they be seeing evidence of care? I hope so. I need to believe so, because we are so fragilely here, so passingly, in each other’s orbit.
I’m keenly aware of that as fall falls. I am a little haunted this year. Aware of the presence of climate change as strong weather batters the world, and as I sit with windows open in upstate NY at the end of October! Aware that 4 years ago my dad was beginning to die, and last year, my father-in-law was. My dad’s last fall runs like a movie in my head. This is when I read him Liberty Hyde Bailey on the back porch. Already I’m running the Veteran’s Day replay.
Remembering him sends me to his papers. I don’t have many personal letters of his — except a few cringeworthy carbons and drafts of letters he wrote me when I was in and out of college! Kevin Charles Halloran wrote lots of things, stories and poems, and letters of a more public style. I have carbon copies of letters he wrote politicians, like one he wrote to President Reagan, questioning why the US was supporting the British in the Falklands. Once my dad retired from teaching, he turned his focus to op-eds, the family habit. His brother Dan was a columnist for a Catholic newspaper. His mother and younger brother, Michael, wrote op-eds, too. (Michael is still alive & still writing.) Georgiana Cole Halloran wrote a letter to one of the Troy newspapers cutting Nelson Rockefeller for destroying 98 acres of neighborhoods in downtown Albany to glorify himself with a marble plaza. She and her children had ideas about what we should be to each other, and they sent them to the papers.
I’ve been wondering how my forebears would handle the news this fall. What would they say to shake their civic fists and rouse the hearts of their neighbors? My dad called me the morning of 9/11/2001 and told me to turn on the TV. Last night, my family text group alerted me to the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden. This morning, Heather Cox Ricardson gave a terrifying recap in her daily Letters from an American.
These letters I send to you are more in the line of personal letters, notes in the mode of another era. This correspondence is my wish for a better, more connected world, full of people who broadly care about people, and who personally care about those close to them. Bread is a metaphor of that wish, but also, a material model of the interconnections of land, people and plants. Of a shared interest in our mutual success.
Toward that ideal, Ellie and I are baking together Friday. We are baking election cake and would love for you to join us.
The bread I share with you today is this: a video that tells the story of a corn sovereignty project in Wisconsin, made by Artisan Grain Collaborative. It made me cry.
Love,
Amy
A good read, reminding me of letters stored in a closet. Of my grandmothers letters to my grandpa the year before they married. Letters about planning their house. Or the ones by that generation about their time at the U of M winter ag course at the time of the Spanish flu in the early 1900’s. Or the ones between sisters about Christmas gifts they made or ordered for my mom. So much history, so many boxes. Precious treasures to me, one of the last who remembers the people. Thank you!
Gosh, I enjoyed both your article and the bread. Among the belongings I brought in the car with me on my cross-country trip were hand written notes received over the years, from my parents, children and grandkids. Little bits of home away from home. Yes, we talked on the phone over the six weeks, but the notes/drawings are precious to me. My intentions to be a more dedicated letter writer fall short, sometimes in the interest of a loved one getting the message immediately via text or email. In the end, I think that a letter in the hand, is worth a bushel full of messages in cyber space!
The video about the connection made between Meadowlark Farm and and Mill and Gwenlyn Hill Farm was a reminder of the how much more we can accomplish when we broaden our connections and work collaboratively. This is an area where I need to stretch myself. Thanks Amy!