My fascination with love letters began when I first read the exchange between poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. Would that I might love someone enough to express it in the poetry of “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” Elizabeth’s love letters to her husband.
Later, I would discover that the tree of love letters has many branches. Not all of them have to do with romance. But all of them have to do with love.
Like this one: Although I may not have realized it at the time, my mother’s love letter to her daughter was a heart-shaped cake she baked, boxed and mailed to my dorm for Valentine’s Day.
Or this one: “It’s been a long time since I got down on my knees to pray,” my longtime friend, Linda, wrote in a letter that arrived the day before my cancer surgery. “But I’m doing it for you tonight.”
I was ten when I started corresponding with Sheila, the beautiful young woman who would become family by marrying my cousin, Herb. My letters contained excitement about attending her wedding, my first. Her loving responses were the beginning of a close relationship that took us through years, and miles that she was always happy to cross to visit me.
Last week, Sheila sent me a copy of the book “Soulmates and Strangers” by author Judith Umlas. A whole different slant on the love letter genre, the powerfully gentle memoir details the lives of two young girls, one in New York and one in France, who became pen pals and created a family legacy. One of those girls was Judy’s mother. The other she would come to call her “French mother.”
Reading the book, I felt like Alice who fell into a wonderland of sacred treasures. The correspondence between the two young women created a dance that began with a two-step and evolved into an elegant waltz. Along the way, the twist and twirls formed a fairy tale that wrote itself into truth.
It made me start fantasizing about what it would have been like to have found letters from my own mother sharing the secrets and hopes of her younger self. To experience stories written in her youthful voice and careful hand. Stories in her heart about dancing around the Maypole, her best friend, first crush and the dreams she had for her adult life.
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While Mom shared stories with me of her early years growing up in the Bronx, they were told from her adult perspective, unlike Judy’s mother, who also grew up in the Bronx, but wrote and exchanged stories in real-time letters with her French pen pal.
The pathos and angst of lives as they were happening were enhanced by the pen and ink handwriting of the letters, many clips of which Judy used in her book.
One of my gifts from “Soulmates & Strangers” was revisiting the power of letters and how they connect us to our personal history. How taking the time to write them and read them is itself an act of love.
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