When I was in third grade, my grandmother and I began writing letters to one another. She lived with a smelly dachshund in a cottage on Mobile Bay in southern Alabama. I was her oldest grandchild growing up in a swarm of siblings in south Florida. I can’t recall the contours of her face with much clarity, but in the eye of my mind I can see her looping penmanship, the tiny ink blobs from her ballpoint pen and the flourish she added to her capital letters. She composed in tidy paragraphs and wrote on sensible stationary. Her letters glowed in my hands; they relayed small stories of her paintings, her dog and her latest outrage over decisions made by politicians.
Through the back and forth of it, I sussed out that writing letters was a lot of gets for not a lot of give. I write a letter and mail it. Then I get a letter sent to me. I get the sweet swish of surprise on the day the letter arrives. I get the billowing little joy of opening it. I get the stories and endearments the letter holds. I get the hum and echo when I take it out and read it again and again.
Soon enough I also learned that it wasn’t just the physical paper thing that was the reward. It was the doing of the thing. The sequence of simple steps to send the letter became another straight flush of reverberating treats. Licking the yellowy, industrial sweetness on the V of the envelope flap. Writing her name and street into my first address book. Inflating with the self satisfaction when I’d memorized my grandmother’s ZIP code. Affixing the stamps upside down because someone told me that was a secret signal that meant I Love You.
The give-and-get letter-writing equation seemed so obvious and so weighted in favor of the getter that I thought maybe I hadn’t figured it out right. If the way I saw it was the way it worked, why wasn’t everyone writing letters? Didn’t they want to get all that stuff too?
I adored my grandmother, and I loved the letter writing. It wasn’t long before that love of letters switched on its high beams to include the mailman who brought the letters to my house. I don’t remember his name or his face and my love wasn’t about him, really, but about the job he was doing. It wasn’t a crush. It was more of an innocent awe. Santa gave me presents at Christmas. My friends gave me presents on my birthday. The mailman brought me presents all the time. In my view of the world, that bringing and giving was a generous wizardry.
Maybe those letters back and forth between my grandmother and I lined my neural pathways with alphabets and set my compass toward the magnetic north of storytelling. I don’t know. I do know that when puberty descended, the letters between my grandmother and I waned, and I shifted my letter writing to South American pen pals and friends who had gone to summer camp and a boy I pined for who had moved away. The letter-writing habit I’d formed with my grandmother and my almost religious regard for mailmen (who at some point reclassified as letter carriers) spawned wider appetites related to sending and receiving mail. These days nothing parallels the geekish thrill of sending postcards, crafting handmade envelopes, deciphering stamps from foreign countries and cadging time-warp stationary from thrift stores. If I built an altar it would be made of stamps and maps and the handwriting of those I love. If my house caught fire the things I would want most to save are the old timey suitcases in the closet I’ve stuffed with letters. If the gods granted such requests, I’d trade all I own to find one more letter in my mailbox from my grandmother.
I’ve left Flag for a year to come to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to teach storytelling and to wander around in a part of the world I know nothing about. In my Bishkek apartment building there is a row of blue postboxes on the ground floor and one with my apartment number painted onto it. But all the little doors to all the boxes are open all the time, and the insides are dusty and empty. The State Department dossier on Kyrgyzstan said it had “a working postal system.” I just don’t get the sense it will be working for me.
I’ve been here two months. I don’t miss peanut butter or sleeping in my own bed or hanging around with my friends. Well, I do, but what I miss the most today is Molly the Mailman walking up the sidewalk to the postbox just beside my front door and tucking a little sweet something inside there. Something with stamps, something with the handwriting of someone I love. Some piece of paper something that made its way from someone’s heart to my hands.
Originally a flatlander, Laura Kelly found Flagstaff eight years ago and knew it was home. She was the executive director of the Flagstaff Symphony Orchestra for four years and last year created the ArtBox Institute for the Flagstaff Arts Council. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to teach journalism and storytelling in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She’ll be back in Flag next year telling stories about where she’s been.
