Reflections from Kitty Axelson-Berry, Part 1

Kitty Axelson-Berry, who founded Modern Memoirs in 1994, also published her own memoir entitled The Hill: Letting Go of It in 2018. The following year, she retired and sold the company to the current owners, Megan and Sean St. Marie. In this two-part blog series, we asked Axelson-Berry to reflect first on her personal experience with writing a memoir and, second, on her experience launching and growing a successful memoir publishing company. Part 1 appears below; look for Part 2 next month.

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 1. Your memoir focuses on your “back to the land” years, which began in the 1970s. Though you initially pushed away from society (“disengaging from the rich, powerful, complicated entanglements with the military-industrial world”), you ended up being drawn to and forming a relationship with the land itself. How did this connection to the place help shape your memoir?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: I’ve toned down my rhetoric since 1971, but I still push back against accepting the status quo! I went to last week’s protest against the Supreme Court’s draft decision to prevent so many women from having control over their bodies.

How could I NOT have formed a relationship with the land, I ask you? Our gutsy determination and mix of cynicism and optimism carried us through at great personal cost. I struggled on the land every day to get to a road, to dig down between tree stumps and boulders for water, to cut and haul wood, to fail at growing our food, to be thirsty, to be frustrated with the weather, the darkness, the freezing rain.... It was a love-hate relationship. The shape of the memoir probably attests to that love-hate relationship on many pages, but what really shaped it is the same thing that inspired me to write it: I wanted to let go of my deep connection with the land, put it to rest. So the memoir was a bereavement ballad from start to finish, although I never got around to the ballad part.

2.   You discuss the tension between “privacy versus what I consider information-sharing and networking” as a theme in your life. Many memoirists struggle with what to include in their books and what to leave out. How did you decide?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: That is one of a thousand themes in my life, and the context was about my cross-cultural marriage, actually. My family of origin was more expressive and free-flowing; my ex-husband’s was more reserved and very private. In my family, we swapped information and it wasn’t considered a “sin.” In memoirs, decisions about whether to include or leave something or someone out are difficult, and although my instinct at the beginning was that of a news reporter, I modified it after reading Family Secrets: How Telling and Not Telling Affect Our Children, Our Relationships, and Our Lives by Harriet Webster. (It’s listed as a resource on the Modern Memoirs website.) My recollection is that Webster’s analysis is wide-ranging and insightful. So for our clients, I learned to be somewhat circumspect. But for myself, I probably erred on the side of sharing too much.

3.   In Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser, author Jill Ker Conway points out, “Traditionally there has only been one female autobiography for every eight written by a male.” Did this fact help motivate you to write yours, or influence what you wrote about?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: Not at all! But I’ve kept aware of research and ideas about why more women don’t write memoirs. To some extent, it seems to be much harder to write about daily life that doesn't have major ups and downs and doesn’t have big, public successes (or failures). Instead, many hours are traditionally spent doing household chores, perhaps practicing fortitude and patience, events (non-events) which certainly don’t write themselves. Another interesting thing is that women, even highly accomplished or successful women, have had a tendency in the past to attribute their successes to something other than their own agency, usually luck. This includes Jane Addams (her autobiography is discussed in the Zinsser book), who in 1931 became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize and never took credit for her successes. She attributed her work to being lucky—she just happened to be in the right place at the right time. But I think this is changing, thankfully. Greta Thunberg and other women activists, Nancy Pelosi and other women politicians claim their own agency.

4.   In your book, you describe the “torture” of writing a memoir. Why was it so difficult?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: Writing is difficult, period. It’s difficult for nearly everyone I know of, so it’s a matter of degree. And writing a memoir is personal, with too much material to select from and too many people (living and dead) to consider. I think it’s better for people to be authentic in their memoirs and not try to be someone else. I don’t know if you still encounter this, but we used to have a fair number of potential clients who wanted to hire us to turn their dry memoirs into something funny and heroic, but we aren’t ghostwriters. I wrote my memoir for myself alone, and it was like an exorcism in a sense. I hoped no one else would ever read it, but apparently you read it. Hopefully you opened it up randomly and skipped around.

 I was being loose, colloquial when I wrote about writing being “torture,” by the way. It isn’t torture and I hope that isn’t a trigger for anyone.

5.   In the end, what was the reward? What did you gain from writing your book?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: It has been astonishingly helpful on an emotional and mental level. I’ve read so much about memoirs and seen so much of clients’ joy, but this feat is over the top and long-lasting, and I am experiencing it personally. My goal of putting the land and those three decades to rest was met. I love being free to appreciate that land and those years, in their glory and despair, from a distance. And I want to add that it’s a relief to have certain photos and data about what happened when, and what so-and-so’s birthday is, in a single accessible place.

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Piecing Together Family Histories with Timelines

Consider the axiom, “You can’t see the forest for the trees,” or the parable about the blind men and the elephant. They both convey how difficult it is to gain an understanding of the whole when we become lost in the details. The same is true in genealogical research: Evidence is discovered in random order, and a disorganized pile of facts may turn into what genealogists call a “brick wall.”

I’ve found that the best way to clean up the pile and get the project back on track is to create a timeline for each family group. This standard tool of data visualization is a relatively easy one to employ, as it distills and structures details into an accessible, readable order.

First things first: A family group, or marriage unit, is a three-person cluster consisting of two parents and the key child who continues the study’s ancestral line. Documentation for each family group typically begins with the couple’s marriage and ends with the death of the last surviving spouse. It also includes information on the key child, but only until the date he or she marries or becomes an unmarried parent. For the key child’s marriage or parenthood and all subsequent events in his or her life, a separate file is started for his or her own family group.

To create a timeline for each family group, I start by making a chronological list of the date and location for each documented event that I have found. And—most importantly—I cite the source for each piece of information.

It’s even more efficient to organize genealogical findings in chronological order as I gather them. I therefore begin research projects by creating a blank “document links” file for each family group. As I discover sources with information related to their lives, I note the date and location of each life event and follow it with a note or link to the source’s location. Each time I add an event and source to the timeline, I place it in sequential order.

Not only does a story begin to unfold before my eyes, but gaps in research are revealed. For example, I might see that I’ve estimated a couple’s marriage year by the number of years they were listed as married in the 1900 U.S. census, but I have not actually located their marriage record yet. Or I might see that I know where the family group lived in 1850 and 1870, but I haven’t yet found them in the 1860 census. Then my task is to follow up on those gaps and try to fill them so that a client’s project meets the Genealogical Proof Standard.

Organizing information in a timeline really does help make sense of it. For one client’s project at Modern Memoirs, I recently researched three generations of a family that moved back and forth between two states in the 1800s. I discovered two information-rich sources that each contained extensive details about the family’s activities in one of the states and made only general references to the other state. Simply highlighting the key information in each source left me confused. But as soon as I placed the key information from each source into a timeline and spliced the two timelines together, it all became clear. The events suddenly fit together like pieces in a puzzle, and a whole picture came into view, telling a single, though complex, story. The sequence of events allowed me to grasp the motivations behind the family’s moves and to understand the roots of intergenerational financial difficulties and successes.

In addition to giving shape to information, a timeline illuminates the contextual backdrop of our ancestors’ lives. Comparing each family group’s timeline to a timeline of local, state, U.S., and world history helps flesh out a family’s story and may suggest leads on additional topics to research in order to gain a fuller understanding of their lives. In a recent talk my brother-in-law gave to a writing group, I was surprised to hear that he uses the same approach in his work. He is an investigative journalist and author, and each time he tackles a research project he creates what he calls “the chron,” or chronology, to match the events he is studying with the context of the time, whether it’s broad historical trends or details about the weather on a particular day long ago.

Sometimes clients choose to include personal or contextual timelines in their memoirs. An excerpt of one client’s political timeline is shown here to demonstrate how behind-the-scenes tools like timelines can also be used in the final presentation of a book.

Regardless of what we call it or whether it appears in print, a timeline is a key tool in the genealogist’s toolbox, and I encourage clients to use it in their own work, too.

Papa, Sasa, and Zamani: Remembering My WWII Veteran Grandfather

This post is the fourth in a series-in-progress by company president Megan St. Marie about heirlooms and objects related to her family history that she keeps in her office to inform and inspire her work at Modern Memoirs.

Megan St. Marie as a child (at right) with her brother, Sean Paul Lambert (at left), and their maternal grandfather, Paul Edward Dowd, 1980

As an undergraduate at Smith College, I took a fascinating course on African religions. Nearly thirty years later, in my work at Modern Memoirs, I often recall a reading assignment from John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy[1] that introduced the Swahili terms “Sasa” and “Zamani.” These words describe concepts of time that hold deep relevance for work on family history and genealogy.

Loosely defined, Sasa refers to the present, or to those memories held by people who are alive today. Sasa is forever receding into the deep past of Zamani, or that which predates any living memory. With regard to ancestors, those people who are deceased but still recalled by the living exist in the realm of Sasa. In other words, although they are dead, they remain in the (remembered) world of the living. Then, when the last person who holds a living memory of a deceased person also dies, the ancestor moves into the realm of Zamani.

The notion that the dead we remember are not fully lost to the past but exist in current (Sasa) memory holds potential solace for the living. Thinking of people I love who have died as existing in Sasa transcends mere sentimentality or nostalgia to awaken feelings of both comfort and the sacred in me. Comfort arises because the losses seem somehow eased, and the sacred because of a sense of responsibility to remember.

As he neared the end of his life, my maternal grandfather (whom I called Papa) said to my mother, “I just don’t want to be forgotten.” Born to an Irish immigrant mother and her Irish American husband in Boston nearly 100 years ago, it’s safe to say that my grandfather, Paul Edward Dowd (1925‒2014), was unfamiliar with the Swahili terms and concepts of Sasa and Zamani. Though he was an avid reader, he never went to college to study African religions or any other subject—something he once told me he regretted. But even if he didn’t use the word “Sasa,” my grandfather’s desire to be remembered evokes his awareness of different planes of existence in the present. By stating what he did not want after his death (to be forgotten and thus relegated to the past in which he lived), he asked for what he did want (to be remembered in the present after his death).

And so, I remember my Papa. I remember times we spent together. I remember the particularities of personality and presence that made him the man he was. I remember stories he told me about his life.

Prints depicting Boston landmarks displayed in Megan St. Marie’s Modern Memoirs office

I’ve written before about how heirlooms and objects related to family history can help spark such memories, but although I’ve filled my Modern Memoirs office with many such items and have others at home, most are from my father’s side of the family. I do, however, own a set of prints depicting famous landmarks in Boston that sits atop my office bookshelves in honor of my Papa. He didn’t give me the prints (they were a gift from my father-in-law), but because he was born and raised in Boston, I associate those street scenes with him. These were places he grew up knowing—Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market, the Boston Common, the gold-domed State House and the Old State House, Boylston Street, Copley Square, Louisburg Square, and the Old T-Wharf.

Close-up of a print depicting the Old T-Wharf in Boston

USS ARD-17, the ARD-12-class floating drydock on which Megan St. Marie’s grandfather Paul Edward Dowd served during WWII

Paul Edward Dowd (front row, center) stationed with other Navy servicemen in the Pacific during WWII, cir. 1945

Though he didn’t work at the Old T-Wharf, this waterfront scene brings to mind how my grandfather did work in the Boston shipyards as a young man. This experience led him to join the Navy at the age of 19, and he served in the Pacific Theater during WWII aboard USS ARD-17, an ARD-12-class floating drydock. On November 30, 1944, ARD-17 was damaged by a near miss from a Japanese bomber while anchored at Kossol Roads, Palau. I believe this was the incident my grandfather told our family about when he found himself near one of the ship’s guns on the deck during an attack. As a shipfitter, he hadn’t been trained to use that weaponry and it was unmanned. Another higher-ranking sailor saw him in the chaos of the attack and shouted, “Shoot it, Paul! Shoot it!”

“I didn’t know what the hell to do,” Papa would say when telling this story. “So I just held onto the thing without ever firing it, and I yelled ‘BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!’”

Though he always laughed when telling this story, he admitted to being scared. The first time I heard him tell it, I remember feeling something akin to fright when I realized that if the attack had gone differently, killing my Papa at age 19, he never would’ve come home from the war, and I would not exist.

A maple syrup jar from Megan St. Marie’s maternal grandparents’ 60th anniversary party

But he did come home. After the war, my Papa returned to Boston and married my grandmother in 1950. They raised seven children together and celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary before his death in 2014. I sadly missed their 60th anniversary celebration, but I have a glass maple syrup jar they gave out as a party favor in honor of the decades they spent living in my home state of Vermont. The syrup is long gone, but the empty jar remains in my office as a memento of the life they built together as part of what Tom Brokaw famously called “The Greatest Generation.”[2]

Today, my grandparents and many others of their era exist only in living memory, or Sasa. The National World War II Museum notes:

Every day, memories of World War II—its sights and sounds, its terrors and triumphs—disappear. Yielding to the inalterable process of aging, the men and women who fought and won the great conflict are now in their 90s or older. They are dying quickly—according to US Department of Veterans Affairs statistics, 240,329 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II are alive in 2021.[3]

 This museum is working to make sure that the memories of WWII do not disappear entirely, and on a smaller scale, I think we do the same kind of work at Modern Memoirs. My grandfather’s service is well-documented in public records, but his personal stories exist only in the memories of those of us who heard him tell them. Like the harrowing but humorous story I relate above, most of his stories were funny. He was not a fan of “mushy stuff,” and it suffices to say that my sentimental streak is not something I inherited from him, though I did get so much more. That truth is what compels me to write about my Papa today, and many Modern Memoirs clients come to us for similar reasons. They, too, feel the comfort and responsibility of loving their relatives and ancestors in the Sasa realm and wish to preserve their memory in writing. As Sasa gives way to Zamani, the books we help our clients create can serve as individual museums, curating and preserving the stories, voices, and individuality of those who came before us for generations to come.

[1] Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. Oxford: Heinemann, 1990.

[2] Brokaw, Tom. The Greatest Generation. New York: Random House, Paw Prints (imprint of Baker & Taylor Books), 2010.

[3] https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/wwii-veteran-statistics

Reflections from Anna Markus

Most of the books Modern Memoirs publishes are memoirs or family histories, but we’ve also helped clients publish essay collections, art books, fiction, and poetry collections. Anna Markus published her book entitled Delicious Air: Haiku with Modern Memoirs in 2020 to give to friends and family as she marked her 75th birthday. This collection of poetry took three and a half months from the day she first contacted us to the day books arrived on her doorstep. In honor of National Poetry Month this April, we asked Markus to reflect on what the publication process was like for her and what it’s meant to share her book with others. (Be sure to click on the video links at the end of this post to see the letterpress process in action for this beautiful, handmade book.)

Don’t touch my plumtree!

Said my friend…and saying so

Broke the branch for me.

Japanese papers on display at the printer’s shop

Choosing the letter “O” from a particular font case at the printer

Fresh lead plates of 3 lines of haiku

1.     In the introduction to your book, you define haiku as a poem of three lines with seventeen or fewer syllables. You say that you fell in love with this poetic form as a teenager and have read and collected haiku books ever since. How did you learn about it, and why did it have such appeal to you?

Anna Markus: I first learned about haiku from my brother, who had them posted all over his room. They sparked something poetic and spiritual in me right away. At that point I had no background in it at all. I began to write my own verses over the years, jotting down words in notebooks and on scraps of paper to capture moments when the familiar becomes somehow new and wondrous.

2.     What is one of your favorite haikus written by another poet?

Anna Markus: My favorite haiku was written by the Japanese poet Tan Taigi:

Don’t touch my plumtree!

Said my friend…and saying so

Broke the branch for me.

3.    Some people might find it confining to follow a strict writing formula. Why is it the opposite for you?

Anna Markus: It’s not the opposite, but I love the challenge of saying so much in such little space. What sets this spare, poetic form apart as the one I most enjoy is its elegant, deceptive simplicity. At its best, haiku holds great spiritual depth as it helps writer and reader alike to see beauty where many would not see it.

4.     You were very involved in the design process of your book, including the selection of materials. How do the aesthetics of your book complement the text?

Anna Markus: I wanted the book to have a Japanese feel in terms of paper, binding, and size, based on samples from my own collection. We were selecting materials at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, which made it impossible for me to visit Modern Memoirs in person. Megan St. Marie went to the printer’s shop and we face-timed so she could show me paper and thread choices. The result was a beautiful, seven-inch-by-four-inch volume with a Japanese paper cover, letterpress text, and hand-stitched, stab binding.

5.     In her poem “Sometimes,” Mary Oliver writes,

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

What makes poetry, or haiku in particular, such a powerful way to “tell about it”?

Anna Markus: Haiku challenges the reader to do just what Mary Oliver suggests. A good haiku startles, makes you see and pay attention, puzzle about the levels of meaning. It should have a number of levels of meaning, and the reader should fill in the rest.

Cabinets with cases or drawers of fonts, letters (upper case, lower case!)

Reflections from Eileen Hultin

Eileen Hultin published her book entitled Embracing the Unexpected: A Memoir with Modern Memoirs in 2021. This Assisted Memoir took one year and one month from the day she first contacted us to the day books arrived on her doorstep. We asked Hultin to reflect on what the publication process was like for her, and what it’s meant to share her book with others.

1. You said that, reflecting back on your decades of accumulated memories, you have much to share with your grandchildren, “who simply cannot imagine what the world looked like when we were small.” What strikes you as the biggest way the world has changed, and what has stayed the same?

Eileen Hultin: Very, very little is the same. Only the basic need for human contact has stayed the same. People still love to celebrate holidays and birthdays together. We are still human beings with the need for human touch, but everything external is different. If someone came back now from 1947 or 1950, they would not recognize the planet. For me, the most significant changes are in communications and travel, which have opened up the world to a vast number of people. There have also been great changes in medicine. With the risks surrounding surgery, disease, and infection, life was much more tenuous when I was a child. Another thing I have never gotten over is appliances! Household chores used to be terrible—you worked so hard. We didn’t have electric mixers, irons, dishwashers, hairdryers, curling irons, vacuum cleaners, floor polishers, leaf blowers. We did everything by hand, so that something that takes ten minutes today would’ve taken two hours back then.

I also see some negative changes, especially here in the West with a decline of our culture that is very worrisome. There was a bigger emphasis on people trying to be their best when I was a child. If you weren’t doing what was expected of you, there was an element of shame, and it seems we’ve lost that. We need to teach the children a little differently—from making sure children are still able to write in cursive to providing strong lessons on history. Without an understanding of history, there is a loss of wisdom. Great leaders have made great mistakes, and if we remember that, it will help us to avoid the same mistakes in the future. I admit I’m not an educator, it’s just a sense I have after 87 years of living.

2. You were born in England, have lived in Mexico and the United States (of which you are now a citizen), and have traveled extensively around the world. What have all of your moves and travels taught you about connection to place?

Eileen Hultin: When we travel, it’s very easy to become what they call an “Ugly American,” to be unconsciously rude. You can’t do that. When I travel to or live in a new place, the first thing I try to do is to stop thinking of myself as British. It’s really important to absorb the culture in which you find yourself. You don’t have to pretend to be Mexican, for example, but I think you’re really missing a wonderful opportunity if you don’t learn to love Mexico. Some people I knew in Mexico never tried to learn to speak the language, but I got a teaching diploma in Spanish so that I could talk with my Mexican friends in their language. I wanted to know about the food, their life, what they believed.

I also think it’s a mistake to continue to think of your birth country as “your” country if you live elsewhere. There’s not any one thing that makes a new country become “your” country, but the first time you hear someone condemn it and you become upset, that is when you realize where your loyalty lies. You’re not going to have your adopted country defamed. I am fiercely loyal to America, embarrassingly so!

3. You said you were raised in a community in which the prevailing belief was that “education was wasted on girls who would marry anyway and stay home raising children.” What role has education played in shaping your life?

Eileen Hultin: Working-class parents couldn’t wait for their teenaged girl to leave school so that she could get a job and earn a living. That’s the way it would’ve been for me had I not gone to high school. Without my uncle, who said, “Let’s make sure she gets an education,” it would not have happened. Then Renee Webster, the headmistress, saw something in me and never let me drop any of the classes I asked to drop. She never gave up hope on me. I was very taken with Renee Webster, and she was a fabulous role model for me. She came from an upper-class family, and her parents traveled extensively with her when she was a little girl. She was elegant, and it seemed like she knew everything. She represented another world to me. She seemed so in control of her life, and that was important to me. I always kept in touch with her afterwards.

It was Renee Webster’s approach to education that propelled me to become a re-entry student at Stanford University, graduating at age forty-eight with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art History. That led to an offer to become a docent at the Cantor Museum on the Stanford campus. Graduating from Stanford, a year after my first marriage fell apart, is the one achievement in my entire life of which I am most proud. I have lived a much richer life as a result of the extra years of study.

4. You express your creative self through painting and photography. How do you think that the visual arts influenced you as the writer of your memoir?

Eileen Hultin: Writing is another form of self-expression, and it needs to please the senses. So, every time I was describing a scene, whether it was something horribly dramatic and sad, or something frightening, like the stormy, week-long kayaking trip my second husband, Johan, and I did in Tofino, I tried to bring it to life with sensory detail. That’s very like painting or photography because you want the person who views your composition to sense what you’re painting. When I do a landscape, I want to present it in such a way that the person is there. They can really see that beautiful light on the trees and sparkling on the water. It is the same with writing. When I was writing about Tofino, I thought, “This was the most horrifying experience, thinking I was not going to live through it, that I was going to drown. How can I capture the impact of that moment?” So, instead of hurrying along with the story, I tried to get the reader onto the kayak with me in the rain, to see my swollen hands and feel my shoulders wracked with pain. I know I was successful because of all the readers who’ve told me they can’t put the book down. They talk about the Tofino trip and say, “God, that was a terrifying experience.” And I think, “Good, that worked!”

5. In the conclusion of the book you say, “Having lived this long, eventful, and happy life, I have learned to forever expect the unexpected.” Were you aware of the truths that you wanted to share in your memoir, or did the writing process help reveal them to you?

Eileen Hultin: As I wrote, I realized that finishing the book was supremely important to me. I wanted to inspire others who were struggling with any turn of events that overwhelmed them. I believe the universe works in strange ways, but there are no accidents. Somebody will read this book at the right moment for them, when they think they can’t face reality, and they’ll realize, “Sure I can.” Also, I wanted to point out that one doesn’t have to start out in life with a proverbial silver spoon. You can succeed when the odds are stacked against you. Attitude is very important, and so is gratitude. If we could just learn to be grateful for what we have instead of looking at what we don’t have, I think the world would be a much nicer place, and I think people would be a lot happier. If you can be grateful for what you have, it helps you to have a good attitude going forward. I think the two words go together.

Written By Hand

Is there any joy quite like receiving a real card or letter in the mail? This milestone occurs at the mailbox at the end of the driveway—usually when you have gone out in your old slippers to bring in the mail. Amongst the rectangular, frowning bills and the shouting ads of junk mail, you see a square, a handwritten envelope. The ink is blue, or black, or occasionally a colorful marker. The shiny stamp, manually applied and slightly askew, has been bought by a person, likely from a person behind a counter who brought out soft binders of clear plastic sleeves holding thousands of stamps from which to choose—fish, wildflowers, jazz in America, breast cancer awareness, holiday, vintage cars. Stamps are their own works of art. On this envelope, you have to squint to see beneath the wavy black lines left by the postal machine, but in little multicolored dots the stamp proclaims, “Celebrate.”

Before noticing the recipient’s address in the upper left hand corner or on the back, your eyes fall on the main address with immediate recognition of the sender. The writer is almost standing before you. Oh, hello, sister… mother… son… old friend. It’s nice of you to stop by.

There’s a distinct feeling of relief and exhilaration that you have something other than bills to pay and ads to recycle. Dog barks. You wave to a neighbor. The day, though drizzly, has cracked a smile. You walk back in the house, having placed the little square on top of the pile in your hands.

In your eagerness to open the envelope, you struggle to get the corner started with your finger, resulting in a paper cut. Couldn’t you wait to walk to your desk and grab the letter opener? If you were able to muster such patience and foresight, you would slice the envelope with clean satisfaction, then put the letter opener back in its place, in a ceramic mug that says “Stay Calm and Carry On,” the handle of which broke off some years back.

You gently pull the card from its casing; it is artsy or cute or inspiring, with a folded-up letter on ruled notebook paper inside it. That handwriting. There it is again, adorning the card, filling the page. You even hear the writer’s voice somewhere in your mind as you read.

There is the time delay factor to manage. Written time vs. Real time. Four or five days or maybe a week has passed from the time the letter was penned until this moment that you hold it in your hands. When you read the line “By the time you read this I will be in [city, state, or country]…” you have to wonder, “So where is she? Is she there yet?” But then again, time doesn’t matter. The essence of the person captured in those lines leaps out at you. A holograph. Timeless, singular, and almost real.

And how is it possible that even though we all (of a certain generation) learned penmanship in elementary school, handwriting can become so unique to each of us? Almost like snowflakes and faces.

There might be occasional mistakes in the writing. Oops, that word was spelled wrong! That word didn’t fit on the line and couldn’t be hyphenated. An “h” is crossed instead of the “t.” The mistakes remain, crossed out with the pen because there is no “delete” key. The imperfections last, like scars and wrinkles and varicose veins.

You sit at the counter and read the card quickly, then start over again, slowly.

You can read it as many times as you wish. You can read it aloud to your dog.

Then you place the card on the table, or perhaps the mantelpiece. How long will it stay there? A day? A week? A month? I tend to keep cards for a year, minimum.

Does every home contain a shoebox of cards and letters hidden somewhere in the attic, under the bed, or in the basement? I have boxes and boxes (and boxes) of letters and cards. I’m not proud of this, but I’ve found no way to discard the papery versions of my sister, mother, son, or friend. Don’t cross me! I love them! Call me a hoarder, museum docent, or even a graveyard keeper, I’ve been tending this mausoleum of correspondence for over half a century.

I apologize to those who will have to deal with my boxes of letters and cards some day in the future. You have my permission to dispose of them, light a bonfire, or make a book out of the ones that are important to you.

For now I will delight in every card I receive and every one I write. And I trust you will always recognize my handwriting.