My sister and I are corresponding this year. We manage to send off one letter every four or five weeks. When I imagined this project, I think I was remembering that surge of connection, that urge to communicate that I used to experience when a personal letter arrived. I would tear it open, devour the news, react audibly to each surprising factoid and run to the computer to reply. Or so I imagined.
Since my sis and I have each acquired a little computer savviness, we can e-mail and chat, in addition to the letter-through-the-mail thing, so that still happens. We're also both on Facebook. All hurry-up info gets transmitted one or several of those ways. Letters, therefore, are for reflection and contemplation.
Our mother taught us about letter writing. She conducted lively correspondences with various old friends and family members, back in the leisurely days of cheap postage. When we went away to school, she wrote faithfully, several times each week. She wrote about the dogs, the cat, the parakeet (until it slammed into the refrigerator and broke its little yellow neck), the neighbors' burgeoning yard art collection, my dad's progress in barbecuing chicken so it was at least warm inside. Homey stuff. A little formulaic, not very interesting, maybe, but it kept alive the illusion of family. That's what Sis and I are doing, all these years later.
Our recurring topic is our kids. Our Adult kids, I should say: the youngest is her daughter, who will turn 30 in January 2012. We circle and gnaw away at the fact that, in surprising and complicated ways, we envy our children.
For awhile, it looked like my kids, who grew up gypsying around the country, going along for the ride, eating at the low end of the food chain (was it abusive to put wheat germ in their chocolate chip cookies?) were triumphing over all that adversity and happily ensconced in the upper middle class, complete with fine cars, big houses, handsome dogs and beautiful kids. Then they started divorcing: both of them in the same year. And it developed that their marriages had been smoke and mirrors for years before whatever occasioned the final rupture. And my heart breaks and breaks for them and for how very little I can do to help.
My sister's daughter is a bright, beautiful, architecture student, who has thought, for a number of years, that she was her parents' keeper. Most recently, this has lead her to renounce them for their temerity in rebuilding a flooded river bed on their property (the flood having come perilously close to the house and brought the river almost into their kitchen)without her involvement. Never mind that they live in Vermont and she is married, living in Oregon in a house that she and her husband own. Niece believes that she has been disrespected by not being consulted and is now excluding her parents from participation with her life.
Sometimes, it is impossible to write about information like this. Sometimes, it's the only way to give yourself a look at what you're really thinking. Correspondence continues.
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