Write a Letter...It's Your Chance to Touch the Future

One of my most treasured keepsakes is a letter that  my Grandmother received from her brother, in 1942, while he was serving in the United States Army. It's just a short, single-sided note commenting on the weather in Virginia and how he feared his little hometown wouldn't be the same when he returned. But that brief note, with a little background on the writer's life, gives me a connection with him I might have otherwise missed.
 

 

 

Sadly, I never met my Grandmother Mary (my mother's mother) or her brother (my mother's Uncle Grant) as they both had passed away before I was born. Growing up, I heard many stories about my Grandmother, saw her pictures, and evidenced a bit of  her creativity in the numerous embroidered tea-towels and pillow cases around our home. Over the years, I felt like I had come to know quite a bit about this happy, loving woman who delighted in her family, and like me, her elementary school students.

"Uncle Grant" was my mother's favorite uncle and she had fond stories of  their times together when she was a child. I still have a small bookcase that he built for her when she was a child...a creation undoubtedly motivated by more than his love of wood working. But the stories of Uncle Grant were typically tinged with a bit of sadness. My mother had always said the Uncle Grant was never really the same after the war. I'm sure no one is really the same after a war but the fact that he became somewhat defined by that has always haunted me.





Now, as I hold his letter in my hands, looking at his neatly penciled sentences, I can't help but wonder if his concerns about his hometown being different upon his return weren't reflections of his own personal changes. Was he a new or seasoned soldier, at this point? I don't even know. All I really know is that I am holding a letter that was personal correspondence between two people who were family. Two people who had their own personal struggles...as we all do. Two people who never had a chance to love me, but because of stories and pictures, I have loved for the majority of my life. If only they would have known that their memory, their legacy, would live on for decades to come - celebrated by a girl they never knew.





Our lives are short and, I suspicion, too often end with words unsaid. I know the handwritten letter will never replace the efficiency of the technological e-mail or text. It shouldn't. But maybe it's time for the hand-written letter to be revived, not simply as a way to say "hello" but as a way to share a bit of ourselves for those who will go ahead of us.  It might be our children or a young friend or perhaps someone we don't even yet know who will one day hope to better understand a person they have come to love.