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100 days of letters

April 17

Dear Turkey Hill Ice Cream,

We bought one tub of you each week at the Bread and Circus. We brought backpacks and walked from campus. We had a $65 grocery budget. We always included you, even though money was tight, because we had to have something sweet.

Not that you were just something sweet, Turkey Hill, you were much more than that. You were the childhood that we were attempting to ferry, one tub at a time, across the threshold into adulthood. We were buying our own groceries and felt so grown up. We were children playing house.

And you were delicious! Far tastier than your modest price point implied!

Thanks for all the bowls of happiness,

-e.

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April 16

Dear Pansies that Grew in My Grandmother’s Garden,

I have several pansy plants in my garden now. The flowers are purple, yellow, orange, maroon, blue. The fact that I have them is largely thanks to you all – I have always loved you but even more so because of how our grandmother let us cut your flowers when we visited her.

I was thinking about that when I deadheaded my pansies last night. I always have mixed feelings about pulling off the withered blooms. Each one seems precious and it seems cruel to break their slender stalks. But my grandmother used to let my sister and I go out into the garden with scissors and cut flowers to make small bouquets for jam jars and she would say, “The more you cut the more will bloom.” I always admire the closely lapped leaves at the base of the plant and the small, furled blooms readying to open. And I remember how it felt almost magical to go out into the flowers after dinner, when the light was looser but still not gone, and return to the living room, the coffee and the evening news, with fistfuls of pansies and the smell of outside on our skin.

I have thought of giving my own kids scissors and letting them assemble bouquets – but for whatever reason I haven’t. Maybe just like we never did that at home, it was something we did only at our grandparents’ house. It just wouldn’t be the same. The magic didn’t extend that far.

You’re long gone now, Pansies, of course. That part of the garden is gone. That’s OK.

Whenever I hang my towels outside to dry they smell just like the laundry my grandmother dried in the drying room alongside their garage. Something in the air is the same, maybe, not quite, but enough, something in the ritual. And something similar in the garden surely doesn’t hurt at all.

Thank you for making more flowers,

-e.

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April 15

Dear Stuffed Aslan,

When my aunt gave you to me as a birthday present, I was thrilled. For a toy you were actually the perfect embodiment of what I pictured Aslan to look like. I don’t know, actually, if you were created as Aslan or if you were just a toy lion, but you were chosen because you looked like the character from the books and that’s how I always thought of you.

You were big enough to fill my arms, to rest a head on. You looked fierce though, so not just a cuddly toy. You were the Great Lion.

I don’t remember when I packed you away. That seems an indignity – I’m sorry. Maybe the other dolls and bears and whatnot recognized your royalty and put you in charge? Also I don’t remember when books stopped making me feel the way they once did.

Anyway. Your mane was so soft. I will always love my aunt for understanding how much I loved you.

-e.

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April 14

Dear My Copy of Ten Little Indians,

Now you would be called And Then There Were None, which is far better of course, but in 1987 you were still Ten Little Indians.

I bought you at a book fair at my elementary school. What a wonderful event that was. Tables in the hallway piled with books so when you walked to the restroom you were walking in a book store. When you walked to the cafeteria: book store. I remember the doors propped open after school and the sunlight falling in rectangles onto the tables and the PTA mothers who were cashiering. Hands and arms exchanging books for money darted in and out of the light.

Do you remember how much you cost, My Copy? I don’t. I also don’t remember what else I bought that day. But I remember that you opened a world for me. Murder on the page! Evil caged by lines of text! A safe place in which to descend into chaos and evil and then – just in time – to watch it all get set right again. Oh and that ending! You knew all the time and didn’t give it away. You sly thing.

Thank you for setting me on my mystery journey, My Copy. You will always have a special place in my heart. (Though not my bookshelf because you, sadly, didn’t make it with me this far.) Maybe you are pulped now because of your racist title. Maybe your paper lives on in another book, on another shelf somewhere. If so, I hope a trace of my happiness from the time we spent together is imprinted somewhere in your aura. Maybe it beckons to other young readers – “Come, begin something here, with me.”

With so much gratitude,

-e.

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April 13

Dear Red Track Shorts with the White Stripe,

I saw my niece and nephew today wearing shorts and they were so happy to have their knees free! I thought of you – you made me feel that happy. I remember summer mornings when I would wake up and feel the hazy heat of the day already gathering. I would swing my legs over the side of the bed, pull you off the floor and onto my hips and be ready to go. My day had started. I was ready to run, to sit in the dirt, to play, to chase down a friend – whatever was needed. The simplicity of it, of you! The confidence I felt! Seven years old and I had no doubts about my rightness in the world or my right to wear whatever I goddamn pleased for every day of my life.

I also remember once I sat in silly putty when I was wearing you. Sorry about that. I panicked a little because the baby sitter didn’t seem to know how to get the putty out of the fabric. Also I was mainly worried about my mom getting mad rather than your welfare, Shorts. Sorry about that too.

I hope that you are helping somebody run and play and explore in that big summer vacation in the sky.

Miss you,

-e.

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April 12

Dear Giant Cape Cod House,

We only knew each other for scattered weekends over two summers, but you have become in my mind The House. You are the place where all the ghosts live. (They’re jumping off your dock and playing croquet on the lawn. They’re limping on your crushed gravel walk, they’re awaiting the diagnosis, they’re recovering in the sunroom. They’re reading Rosamunde Pilcher in a deck chair, exploring the carriage house in pairs, jostling and joking in the kitchen. They’re confused in your splendor, whispering “how lucky?”)

You are the shape of my memory palace. You are the setting for the stories that swirl in my chest like smelly vapor from a magician’s smoke machine.

I really did love your sunroom. Even if you were the place where it all started to unravel, I remember that room with uncomplicated tenderness.

Get out of my head you beautiful ruin,

-e.

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April 11

Dear Cassette of R.E.M.’s Reckoning Album,

I’ve been remembering all the times we walked home from school together with our trusted friend Sony Walkman. I can still picture that walk with such clarity. There was a stretch after you turned left at the Armory and the road dips down between a stand of trees and some apartment buildings and the air was always cool and damp, like a small, separate climate, before we had to take the brave step into the tunnel.

Out on the other side of the tunnel was all bleached white retaining wall and busy street, before the steep climb up the hill to home.

That little cool half-block, like a sweet drink of water on a hot day, has stayed with me. It would be hard for me to find it now, it would look different of course, but how many days did we just linger there for a minute, Cassette, with that most perfect music soothing all that needed soothing, before stepping into the tunnel?

Middle school, Cassette, am I right?

I don’t know if I ever told you this but I sometimes fantasized about a car pulling up alongside me on my walk home and Michael Stipe sticking his head out of the car (I don’t think he wouldn’t be driving. Who would? Maybe Peter?) and saying something like hey, we notice you are listening to our music – and you seem really cool, want to hang out with us? But he wouldn’t really have to say much, because we would get each other instantly. And I would spend the day with R.E.M. and we would all be really, really great friends.

Do you remember how I could turn you over to play the other side while I was walking?

I think “Finest Worksong” is still my favorite.

Thanks for the company,

-e.

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April 10

Dear Hillside Ave,

Remember that time I rode my bike up your hill and when I went into the house no one cared how out of breath I was? That was lame.

Remember when my sister, our friends and I rode our bikes down your hill and scared the piss out of ourselves? That was awesome.

Remember how I used to run back along you from the bus stop if I had gotten into a fight with my parents and I absolutely needed (needed!) to make it up with them before the school bus came in the morning?

I miss those days, miss you.

-e.

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April 9

Dear Photo of My Grandmother in Which She Scratched Out Her Own Face,

You lived in a shoebox on the top shelf of my grandmother’s closet in the senior living apartment. One day my sister and I were visiting her there and she brought the whole box down and while the box was full, you were the one I remember, Photo.

You held both her and her sister, you captured a moment in which they were young women standing on a sunny doorstep somewhere in Boston. The sun slanted in a little too strongly – am I getting this right, Photo? – and long before that moment in her tiny apartment, maybe just after you were snapped, she had taken a pin and scratched out her own face. When she saw you she ran her arthritic finger over your bald patch and said, “I did that,” before moving on to the next.

Did it hurt, Photo? Maybe not so much in nerve endings but in betrayal? Do you feel a kinship with your subjects, a protective responsibility for their image, do you cringe when they can’t even look at their own face? Does a photo feel shame or grief when people can’t bear to look at them and turn them to a wall or a tabletop? Do you wish people could just appreciate the truth of what you show, own the moment for better or for worse?

Most importantly, can you tell me why she did that? Was it the moment she hated, was it a memory, was it the photographer, was it something she saw in her face? Do all people go through a period when their face repulses them? Do all women? All women I know, all women who share my last name?

I should have asked her at the time, though I doubt she would have told me. I don’t know where you went, Photo. I don’t know where any of your kind went. I would have loved to have you. I would put you in a beautiful box and keep the box somewhere safe.

Stay mysterious,

-e.

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April 8

Dear Poison Ring,

She gave you to me as a present – for what? birthday? Christmas? No reason at all? – and I wore you with cautious, self-conscious pride and curiosity. Could I be this person now, someone with so much edgy style? (In retrospect, not as edgy as I thought. More Renaissance Faire than true Renaissance, if you know what I mean. Not that you were a poser, Ring, you were always just authentically yourself and very cool. But college-aged nerds do sometimes posture, and I may have misjudged how well I could pull you off … oh, pun unintended.)

Anyway, she gave you to me and explained how people in 1600s Europe used to wear them to sneak poison into someone’s dinner like chic assassins. And she probably said something about how I was that cool and lethal, that would have been just like her. You had a deep red (faux) stone and a tiny clasp. She filled your filigree reservoir with glitter. I wore you to the corner convenience store where you could buy dusty cans of soup and stale granola bars for too much money and where I sometimes would go when I couldn’t face the dining halls. No other students were ever there. No one was ever there except the suspicious cashier. I wore you, Ring, and you made me feel strong when actually I was crumbling inside.

Well, you know what happened next. I got back to my dorm room and you were gone. But do you know how I searched for you? There was lumpy, dirty snow along the sidewalk and I tried to use the light from the street lamps, but it was dark, and though you were big on my finger you were actually quite small, Ring. I couldn’t find you. Every time I walked there afterwards I looked. Nothing. I had never felt you slip away.

Did someone find you, Ring, maybe in the light of morning, maybe when the snow had gone? Someone find the glitter in your belly? I hope so. I tried to tell her how I had lost you, how sad I was, how I had searched – I don’t think she quite believed me. She kept saying it didn’t matter, that you hadn’t been expensive, as if that were the point.

Glitter on, you cool, wicked thing,

-e.