Granny’s letters

Every day except Sunday, around 6 a.m., Granny would sit at her writing desk. Her day started with a cup of coffee, a Kool, a Bic pen and a writing tablet. Every day except Sunday, Granny wrote letters to people.

The letters were, generally, not works of great literary art. A little bit about the weather, a little bit about the hummingbirds (King and Queen, she named them), a little bit about the latest production from the vegetable garden or the honeybees in their little beehive. Maybe the latest from the doctor about her bursitis, or some news from the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in which she was very active as a member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary. The letters mostly recounted the events around the very small settlement in deep, deep Ozark County, Missouri, in which my maternal grandmother lived with her second husband. The little cabin in the holler was near Bull Shoals Lake, some 80 miles from Springfield, and far, far from anywhere.

Granny was not a writer by trade or training. She was a young wife and mother in the years immediately following World War II. Then she was a divorcee in her 30s, after my mother’s father’s mental illness turned dangerous. Then I came along and made her a grandmother about a month before her 37th birthday. When I was 2, she married again, to a retired career Army man who owned some land in deep, deep Ozark County, Missouri. So she was essentially retired at 40. She settled into what generally seemed like a very peaceful life and a very peaceful — and productive — routine.

Occasionally, I’d get one of those letters, signed “Love, Granny & Grandpa Larry.” My parents would get one of those letters, addressed to both of them, signed “Love, Mom and Dad Larry.” Because I liked to write, I’d answer my letters on occasion. My mom didn’t like to write, so she never answered the letters. That didn’t stop her mom from writing them, though, and Granny’s letters showed up in our mailbox once every 10 days or so.

Every day except Sunday, Granny wrote letters and drank coffee and smoked Kools until after the Today Show ended, around 10 a.m. She’d fold the letters carefully in thirds and put them in the envelopes. When I was visiting, she’d let me lick the stamps and have me carry the letters to the mailbox, about 250 yards up a gravel driveway. While I walked, I looked at the envelopes, with names of people I didn’t know with addresses in Arizona, where Granny grew up, or Ohio, where she lived before she moved to Missouri, or Beale Air Force Base, California, where Granny’s other daughter and her Air Force sergeant husband were stationed.

When I got to the top of the gravel driveway, I’d lift the flag on the mailbox and put the letters inside. The mail truck would come down the equally unpaved County Road OO-10 around 2 p.m. and take the letters and leave letters from Arizona or Ohio or California, and that was how Granny stayed in touch with the world.

Granny was not a writer by trade or training. But she had a writing routine and discipline that I, a writer by training and once by trade, have yet to develop. I wish her writing habit had not been accompanied by her Kool habit, because the Kools killed her before she was old.

Had the Kools not killed her, she would have lived well into the online era1. She would have been in her late 70s when Facebook became a thing. I can totally imagine what she would have posted, and in my mind, I can visualize her selfies with her friends at the Ladies Auxiliary, or maybe a picture of freshly canned vegetables or the hummingbirds. She would likely have enjoyed that immensely, because she was outgoing and eager to share her adventures.

But in that same thought, I consider that maybe she would have preferred to sit at her desk and write her letters, with the Today Show on in the background. I think she was OK with waiting a few days or weeks or never for a response.

And I consider how much better that approach might work for me, as I rediscover the simple joy of writing. Every day except Sunday, with the coffee and without the cigarettes, what if I just took some time to tell a story?