She wrote in a particular hand.
The cursive that her generation learned as a standard, as a required skill, as the way a person communicated on paper before the world changed its mind about what communication on paper required. The loops and the connections, the way the letters lean slightly forward as though hurrying toward something, which is characteristic of her in all her forms, the forward lean of a woman who has places to be and things to accomplish and does not see the point of delay.
I found a box of her letters in the things she gave me.
Not her letters to me. Her letters from other people, kept, the way she kept things, in the careful understanding that correspondence was evidence, was the record of a relationship at a particular moment in time, was something you did not throw away because the moment had passed and would not come again and the letter was what remained of it. Her sister’s letters. Her mother’s letters. One from a friend I have never heard her mention, written in 1971, which is the year before I was born, which means the person writing was writing to a version of my mother I have never met, a version of herself she has only described to me in fragments, the before-me version.
I read slowly.
Not all of them. Some of them felt like hers in a way I did not have permission for, in a way that the reading would have been an entry into the private territory of a woman who has a right to her private territory even now, even when she cannot always remember what the territory contains. I read the ones that felt like they could be read, that had the quality of things she would have shared eventually, and I held the others and put them back.
Her sister’s handwriting is similar to hers.
I did not know that. I have no other sample of it, no other way to know, and here in this letter from 1983 is the evidence that the hand was in the family, that the forward lean was shared, that there were two women writing toward things with the same inherited urgency. Two women I come from. Both of them leaning forward. Both of them in me, in the way I write, in the way I move through a room, in the way I am in a hurry toward the things that matter and have been my whole life without knowing the lean was inherited.
I come from women who wrote letters.
I am writing poems. It is the same thing. It is the reaching across distance toward a person who needs to hear something from you. It is the leaning forward. It is the refusal to let what matters go unsaid.
