blanket. The trunk reawakened rusty memories of our family’s past, especially for me: so many family members I never knew, numerous ghosts, hypothetical beings who had translated into old photographs, now only images of who they once were. Each thin, waxy image hinted at stories untold, voices I’d never hear, faces I’d never touch, and rooms that no longer existed. The pictures reminded my grandfather not only of the past, but of all the years he’d shared with the woman he loved. Often he broke off into long soliloquies, recalling childhood days and young love’s inescapable spell.
After a while, due to my relentless curiosity, I couldn’t help but to
open the plastic bag filled with my grandpa’s letters. No one had paid them any attention. Among the objects of our family history, I recognized those letters as something valuable, something different: the leap from images to words, from exterior illustrations to personal voice. I’d kept a journal for countless years, and I knew that the written word led to a very different understanding of a person’s past. When I look at old journals, entries from five years ago sound nothing like my current self. Yet through reading old writing, I’m afforded the opportunity to listen to my own self, an odd but also beneficial—even rare—experience. I can trace my path from adolescence into young adulthood simply by reading old notebooks filled with scattered thoughts. Although my grandpa did not keep a physical journal, he wrote those letters, and they were not images like the photos in the bottom of the antique trunk, but rather records of my grandpa’s voice. Letters are not technologically dependent forms of communication; they are personalized handwritten messages. And our writing—the literal pen on paper—allows for a more intimate form of conversation.
I discovered the art of letter writing, the heightened experience of
communicating via ink spelled words, during a literature program through the University of Michigan. It was the summer after my sophomore year of college, and I decided NELP, or New England Literature Program, was exactly what I needed for myself: living in the outdoors. The program took 186
Excellence in Upper-Level Writing 2012