like this this picture postcard, mailed 113 years ago
to my Grandmother Rovilla from her Cousin Nina.
[Rovilla wrote "Eugene" but she meant "Ernest"]
see my recent Family History posts:
#9: The Reider Cousins
&
#10: The Miller Sisters
The continuation of my
Family History Project
@The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A literary blog of connection & coincidence;
custom & ceremony
*****************************
Photos or letters?
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
features this comparison:
"Imagine all that you have said to another, all the commentary you have exchanged with friends over drinks, over the phone with colleagues and distant relatives, all the prattle sent quickly, mindlessly over e-mail, messages typed into your cellular phone, and really, the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives; but all of that is gone. Vanished! And one day, Mr. Watts, you yourself will be gone.
"Perhaps if you have children, they will remember you; if you have grandchildren, they, God allowing, may also retain a few fragments of memory including you, but their children will not. They may keep some old photos in a book on a shelf, and perhaps two or three times in a lifetime may turn the page and find your face and think, Ah, yes, doesn’t Jimmy resemble this great-great-grandfather Mick, and continue to turn the page, and so that will be what is left of you, nearly erased, in fewer than three generations, and your life, the life you see from the inside, right now, as monumental, will be reduced to the blood in their veins and perhaps, if you are lucky, a distant namesake, a name plucked from the family tree that has come back in vogue after seventy-odd years as fashionable things tend to do and slapped on a newborn baby who will know nothing of YOU.
"And yet, if one has committed oneself to the page, the tragedy I’ve just laid out will not apply. Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?
"If all of this amounts to you as nothing more than drivel, then you might also consider a simpler value of the written letter, which is, namely, that reaching out in correspondence is really one of the original forms of civility in the world, the preservation of which has to be of some value we cannot yet see. The WRITTEN WORD, Mr. Watts. The written word in black and white. It is letters. It is books. It is law. It's all the same. I had some notion of this from as far back in life as I can remember, and I've been writing letters out into the world since I could form a sentence with the pen (age nine)."
(pp 46 - 47)
from The Correspondent
Perhaps conveyed above,
as you look into Nina's eyes:
“I know you think of me as your mother only,
but please remember, inside I am also just a girl.” (242)
Summer Gift Ideas ~ Kitti's List
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