Mother and Dear

My mother and her mother lived 500+ miles apart at a time when travel was slow. Although they didn't visit regularly, they didn't lose touch because they wrote letters to one another.

Every Saturday morning, my mother sat at her small writing desk in her bedroom and pounded out letters on her black Underwood typewriter. I remember that she liked Crane's stationery, that her blue-and-white ashtray (perhaps Delft) was shaped as a fish, that she always had a lit cigarette, and that she wrote with lively detail and thoughtful concentration. I never read her letters, which she signed with a fountain pen in blue ink. That would have been presumptuous.

But I have imagined them: reports of her garden -- the making of new beds bordered in stone, the planting and blooming; the children and our progress and misdeeds; her community and volunteer work; her work with the Altar Guild and the latest hangings she and other ladies fashioned on silk.

People have told me that my mother was charming and that my grandmother was, as an older friend once told me, imposing. One thing I remember is the sound of their voices and laughter, the deep resonance of their Virginia-rolled vowels. My grandmother lived into old age (she died at 99), while my mother died in youthful middle age (at 47). It's strange now to know that Dear, my grandmother, lived for more years after Mother's death than Mother lived in her whole life.

But their love for each other lives still in this photograph, as does the mutual pleasure they evidently took in the other's company.