My granddaughter came downstairs the other night long after the rest of the household had settled in for the evening. I was communing with my laptop. She works a couple of jobs and attends college. I’m awfully proud of her. “Grandpa, I need your help,” she said. “How do you address a letter?” I was startled. Don’t they teach that in school anymore? What was once a basic living skill was now esoteric knowledge.
Mail was a powerful mystery that engaged my imagination as a child. It was a link to the outside world that was at once entertaining and empowering.
Our mailbox was a galvanized metal affair mounted on a Bois D’arc post situated beside the dirt road about a half-mile from my home. As soon as I could walk, I accompanied my mother on her daily pilgrimage to “check the mail.” We would stop by the sandstone Methodist church where Mama would sit on the steps and pray and I would explore the shade of the cedar hedges.
I recall the day Mama announced it was my brother’s birthday and she didn’t have supplies to make a cake and there was no money. I listened as she prayed and asked for divine help. The words were scarcely out of her mouth when I spied something in the leaves at my feet. It was half of a $10 bill.
When Mama opened the mailbox it was always exciting. There might be a letter from one of the grown siblings living out in the world or a response from her pen pal, a farm wife she never met but corresponded with for 17 years. I remember the Strout Realty catalogues my father ordered that listed farms for sale complete with cows, pigs and chickens. Mama would place her outgoing mail in the box and raise the red flag so the postman would be sure to stop. She might be sending a wrinkled dollar bill to Brother Ray T Pedigo Missions to Japan or a letter to my sister at her home a few miles away. She would write “Leave on route” on the envelope, bypassing the need for a stamp.
When we reached the farm to market road, I was enchanted by the giant pecan trees whose branches met above in a cloud of cool emerald light. Squirrels frolicked along the broad spreading branches like children at play. On that day, there was a letter from my brother’s wife with a $5 bill inside and a note that said, “I thought you might need this.” We returned home that day to find my aunt waiting in the driveway. “Alice, I was just at the supermarket and they were having a two-for-one sale on cakes. We can’t eat two so I thought of you.” Just another day in my mama’s expect-a-miracle life.
By the time I was five years old, I was making this expedition on my own. It was a big world. Sometimes I was early and I had time to explore while I waited for the mailman to arrive in his dusty station wagon. Across the road was a windmill and a stock tank where animal tracks and water critters like frogs and turtles and fairy shrimp awaited my attention. In the ravine nearby grew the sweetest dew berries. In season, the ground was littered with the fall of little native pecans. You could make 6 cents per pound selling pecans to the local grocery store. I killed my first copperhead snake on one of these trips. I turned over a board at the base of the mailbox post and found a 20-inch snake the color of a burnished copper pan. I held it down with a stick and sawed its head off with my pocket knife. A trip to check the mail was rife with adventure.
One of my first experiences of mailing was sending off my rolls of 120 film from my Kodak Brownie to Fox Photo in Oklahoma. I would check daily for the return of my carefully composed black and white photos. The anticipation was delicious. I followed my siblings lead in ordering merchandise from the back of comic books. There were also many freebies available for the cost of a stamp. I requested picture cards of birds from Arm & Hammer baking soda.
I was 15 when my family moved to another state. I often felt homesick. We had a phone for the first time but long distance calls were prohibitively expensive. A first class stamp was 3 cents and you could send a postcard for a penny. I carried on a correspondence with several friends and family members. I can still smell the perfume one friend used to scent her missives. She would cover as many as 25 notebook pages in lavender ink with her gossip, news, hopes and fears. Sigh.
After I left home and was on the road, the comfort I drew from a letter was substantial. To this day the phrase “letter from home” has special connotations for me. Once I was writing my mother. I had no stamp so I drew one in the corner and wrote “No postage required” across the bottom of the letter. I confirmed later it was delivered without postage due.
Today when I go to the mailbox I find a dozen or more pieces of mail but they are almost exclusively bills, magazines and circulars. My heart catches when I see an envelope fat with folded pages and a so very human handwritten address.
I showed my granddaughter where to place the name and address of the recipient, and then her own on the plain white envelope, and then where to affix the 43-cent stamp in the corner. I hope her grandchildren will one day still practice that arcane art of sending mail and look forward with anticipation to a letter from home.
