My dear Mary
August 25th, 1849
My dear Mary,
You would long since have received a letter from me had it not have been for want of leisure. You who have lived here must remember what a scene of hurry & bustle the house always presents, but more particularly in the Summer season, and although my own little home was one of quiet and calm, yet my children and household cares employed the most of my time. But although I would not write you my thoughts were very often with you and I looked forward with a great deal of pleasure to receiving a visit from you in my home (I know no sweeter name to call it).
That’s how the letter begins. It was found in an estate sale box filled with old envelopes and stamps, handwritten on a 15.5″ x 10″ piece of paper, in copperplate script so elegant that somehow it makes me sad when I look at it. Did the writer use a quill pen? How did she keep her lines so even and straight – did she use a ruler? After she wrote the letter, she folded the large piece of paper in half, then in thirds, then in thirds again, so that it became both letter and envelope. She sealed the envelope with red sealing wax and addressed it to Mrs. William Summer of Grimsby.
At first it was hard to decipher that lovely, antique handwriting, but it got easier as I went along. The letter is long, from a woman to her granddaughter, filled with news of the health of family members and friends, the longing of the writer for some peace and quiet, her silent worry over her grandniece’s sweetheart, who had left for Provence a month ago. She has not heard from him since he left the isthmus but has been expecting a letter from him for a month past. We all feel a great deal of anxiety about him but we hope and trust for the best.
The letter sits on the table where I’m typing this blog post. Surrounding it is a computer cable, my Precise V7 Rolling Ball black pen, a glass of water, my credit card, a box containing a deck of cards and the score of every one of the hundreds of rummy games the painter and I have played over the last four years, my cell phone, and a plastic hair clip. The letter is the only item on the table that existed, or even could have existed, 168 years ago when it was written.
Do you want to know how the writer ended her letter, the last paragraph of which is not the perfect copperplate of the rest but almost a scrawl, and which also contains an uncharacteristic misspelling? Now my dear Mary I must bid you good night for it is getting late and baby is crying. You and Willie must come up as soon as possible you do not know how anscious I am to see you both up here and I hope you will not let any thing prevent your coming. Believe ever affectionately, your GrandMadame.
That photo over there to the right is the very long tail of a very large rat that ran over my bare feet as I stood at the stove cooking dinner. The story behind the tail is one of intrigue and horror – me sauteeing vegetables at the stove while chatting with The Painter who was seated behind me, me suddenly feeling a squirrel or a small cat run over my bare feet, me shrieking and whirling around to tell The Painter that a squirrel or a cat had run over my bare feet, The Painter trying desperately to contain his horror because he had witnessed exactly what ran over my bare feet and rats are not cats. 
Friends, I’m old enough to remember the Willie Horton ad. I’m old enough to remember when the Central Park Jogger –who was around my age, a jogger like me, white like me, educated like me– was raped and left for dead. I remember being terrified at the idea of “wilding” youths –who, somehow, were always black– out to get girls like me. And I remember three months ago, when I was stunned at the outcome of this election and none of my friends who aren’t white were.
hat before spellcheck, he would say the word out loud and then look through the dictionary trying to find it by first letter. A word like psychology, for example, he would sound out and then search through all the S words. Not finding it, he would then look through all the C’s even though he was sure that it couldn’t begin with C. It was a slow and agonizing process, and all his papers came back with low grades and comments like “Your insights are terrific but you must learn to proofread.” 
Yesterday I sprinkled some sliced almonds into a small pan and turned the flame on low. I stood beside the stove watching over the pan and occasionally flipping the almonds so that they would brown evenly and not burn. When they were dark golden I shook a little sugar over them and stirred until they were caramelized. Then I turned the almonds out onto a plate to cool and took the pan over to the sink. The sink is a strange, cheap, plasticky thing, scarred from hot pans, so I held the pan up to the faucet and ran water in it to cool it down first. The water hit the pan and steam billowed up into my face. Suddenly I was breathing in vaporized sugar – I could feel it in my lungs and taste it as it went down. It was the most amazing sensation. I stood there by the sink and thought, All these years I’ve been alive and this has never once happened to me before. Then I thought of this poem, which I have secretly treasured ever since I first read it because I love how words, if you toss them around in your mind and on your tongue, turn surprising and magical in that same alchemical way. 
A long time ago, I floated down a tunnel toward a light far away. The floating was slow and the sensation around me was warm and soft. I was conscious the entire time, not thinking but feeling, and the feeling was Here we go again. At a certain point, soft bits of metal touched the top and sides of my head. Nothing hurt. Everything was inevitable. What would happen, would happen. This is my memory of being born. (The soft bits of metal part had always confused me, until one day my mother told me I had been a forceps baby, pulled out at the end with metal tongs.) The below excerpt from Kao Kalia Yang’s beautiful, haunting memoir The Latehomecomer makes me remember it all over again, in a different way. From the sky, I would come again.
1) When I was young and had just lost someone I loved, I prayed one night for him to give me a sign from wherever, if anywhere, he was. The next morning I dreamed that his arms were the blanket over me and the bed under me. The sense of comfort disappeared the minute I woke up, but I’ve remembered it all these years. 2) Once, in a CVS, years after she had died, I smelled my grandmother, the powder she always wore. I followed my nose from aisle to aisle until I found her, a small old woman looking at birthday cards. She was not my grandmother, and yet she was my grandmother. 3) Last spring, my friend Kathi and I were on a television show that was being taped outdoors. As Kathi was talking, my friend John Brett, husband of my friend Gail, appeared at the edge of the set. He was smiling, of course, and a giant surge of happiness went through me at the sight of him and I waved at him and thought, I have to tell Gail I saw John! Then I remembered, again, that John had died. But I told Gail anyway. 4) I love this poem below for so many reasons, but most of all for these lines: The theory of six degrees of separation/ was never meant to show how many people we can find,/ it was a set of directions for how to find the people we have lost.
I’m the mother of an immigrant and the aunt to immigrants. Family members and many of my dearest friends are gay. I am both a patron and former client of Planned Parenthood. I do not identify as Christian. These four facts alone make me –a white, middle-class born-and-bred citizen of this country– and my immediate and extended family current targets for persecution by my own government. Beyond that, many of my students, colleagues and friends are a) not white, b) Muslim, c) immigrants, d) people living with mental and physical disabilities. Being a patriotic American, which I most certainly am, means that my responsibility is to speak out against fascism. Being a progressive, which I also most certainly am, means keeping my focus on the bigger picture, which is the world as I know it to be, the one that Naomi Nye so beautifully brings to life in this poem.
Alison McGhee 