The family letters weren’t stored with the rest of our things. They weren’t kept with the pictures in the attic. Our family’s words and letters were the only thing more precious to my mother than our photographs. They were stored, hidden really, under linens and old clothes, in the bottom shelves of a dresser in my mother’s bedroom, some of them bound together in ribbons and bows, sorted in batches or rubber-banded by the year they were written or by theme – like “Bergamo” or “Engagement Letters from Barry.”
There were boxes of them, letters, notes, printed emails, birthday cards, anything written in the slightest degree of heightened feeling. There were stacks of diaries, full diaries, partial diaries, diaries from her childhood, from her college years, from her final vagabond push.
And then there were her children’s diaries and letters, both to and from her, winding into early adulthood, minor epistles that she gathered up behind us, tidying and tucking them away together with her ch…
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