Cherished family letters from Mom

Too bad life doesn’t work like my husband’s favorite video game of Mahjong.
If he realizes 20 moves into the game that he should have taken a particular tile 10 moves back, he hits the back button and replays his stack of tiles.
Real life does not have a replay button. I wish it did sometimes – especially if I could go back and keep the letters the women in my family, especially, my mother and I wrote over the years.
Those letters, begun around the time my brothers, sisters and I were in high school, recorded our progress through high school, college, marriage and the advent of all of my parents’ grandchildren.
Long distance calls were much more expensive in those years before the break-up of AT&T. We limited ourselves to weekend or early morning snatches of conversation during the off peak hours.
Because we did not have a phone the first year of marriage, I looked forward to my mom’s letters. I craved them so much that my husband wasn’t sure which I looked for more at the end of the day ‘ his arrival, or the handful of mail he brought in each night. My mother wrote not only about herself, but checked in with each of her adult children and forwarded a synopsis of our activities as the family reporter.
In return I recorded the details of my days, the milestones in each of my children’s lives, our family outings, the progress in the remodeling of our carpenter’s nightmare and our garden’s vegetable production.
At the time I did not value or cherish those letters for what they were: a history of my family. I usually read, shared my mother’s letters with my husband and children and tossed them in the circular file. The same thing happened to the letters I wrote which I wish I had copied – they would have provided my children a glimpse of their childhood from my perspective.
I thought all my letters were gone. Then a few years ago my Arizona sister sent me an large envelope of two years worth of my letters which she had saved and stuck back in her files to be re-discovered at a later date.
Last month she sorted through another set of stored papers and found a journal my mother began keeping in 1982. Sis sent the journal to me to read. For a few weeks in the journal my mom noted the day’s mundane events: Shopping for groceries, visitors or where my dad’s truck driving job took him. Her daily notes were brief and did not last very long – but, for seven months she consistently stapled into the journal the original of the legal sized page of family news she sent out every week or so. The first letter included a sentence, “Joan, I really think that she (my then 7 month-old daughter) looks like a Gerber baby.”
I cherished that for my daughter who is now 23 years-old. Because her grandmother died when she was still in grade school, my daughter has few memories of her grandmother and never knew her as an adult. Scanning another letter with me, my daughter read a light-hearted, very feminine rationalization for buying another pair of shoes.
“I can not imagine her doing that,” my daughter said. It is the little things like that, captured for the next generation in those letters which I wish I could push the replay button and go back and this time around tuck them away for safe keeping.
The letters contain no great earth-shaking information, no deep thoughts or words of advice, just glimpses of how human our family is.
And that is what I did not realize I had at the time. Thanks, Sis, for pushing the replay button for me for just a little bit.