Fancy Script

long, hand-written letter arrived this week from my Aunt Betty who lives in Amherst, New York.  First, she apologized for being such a “dinosaur” as to write a letter and mail it – for, she explained, her granddaughter told her that no one, absolutely no one, did that anymore. She went on to tell me all the newsy stuff, in storyteller’s prose, about the extended family – stories she would have given my mother if my mother had been alive to receive them. That is what they did, these sisters – ever since our family moved from the homestead in Upstate New York to the mountains of North Carolina in 1965 – they wrote letters, stuffing as many weighty words into one envelope as a single postage stamp would allow.

Aunt Betty’s familiar handwrit- ten envelopes would arrive at our house weekly, usually around Thursday. This was an event; my mother would save the letter for a special half-hour when she could sit on the porch or at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. The long letter would be written on pastel stationery, front and back, pages numbered. I loved Aunt Betty’s letters – then, as now – for they contained news of my many cousins, curious gripes about my Uncle Don, stories of Uncle Harold’s new tractor or Aunt Mary Jane’s new imagined illness, this and that, always a word or two that summed up the well-known eccentricities of one family member or another. I especially enjoyed reading about their cousin the priest, “Father Don Hebeler,” and his annual trips to Germany where he had been assiduously researching and compiling the Hebeler family tree from its origins in the “dorf” called Heubuhl in Bavaria. His work dated to the year 1600, stopping then only because of a church fire which destroyed all family records prior to that year – a church that had been built in 1280, he wrote.  Father Don would handwrite or type his annual findings and impressions to Aunt Betty . . . who in turn sent them to my mother . . . who in turn crammed them into boxes and sewing baskets along with other letters . . . which in turn came to my possession when she died 18 months ago.

The only time I am likely to shed tears for my mother is when I see her handwrit- ing – as in, when a recipe that she wrote falls out of a cookbook, or when an old letter or card swirls from a novel which I read long ago -- having been used as a handy bookmark at the time.  Last year, while sorting through old books, I found a postcard from my mother, dated 1981, from the Peace Bridge leading to Niagara Falls, in which she thought to pass on her procedure for making sauerkraut – Kraut - wash, core, shred 40 lbs. sound cabbage – that’s how the postcard begins. I remembered . . . after my father retired, they would visit relatives in Upstate New York every fall, driving home by way of Canada to fill the trunk with “sound” cabbage.

That’s how I come upon her handwriting these days – or, it comes upon me, as I like to think – for I’ve noticed several times that the message on the card seems oddly apropos to a thing I’ve been thinking of – as in, making sauerkraut – and both the timeliness of the message and the familiarity of the handwriting, not to mention the way it falls to my lap, will trigger a few unannounced tears. Handwriting seems to carry the essence of a person, just as a worn shoe, or a familiar voice or gesture. My mother’s handwriting never changed in all the years I knew her, and so I thank my lucky stars that I had the subconscious foresight to plant those handwritten items into books and drawers so I could find them hence – 10, 20, 5 or 3 years later – now, when I’m paying more attention to what she said than I did at the time.

And isn’t it that way with most letters – how we value them more when the author is gone? My Aunt Betty, newsy as she is, told me in her recent letter about her volunteer work at the Amherst Museum where she has spent months deciphering and typing the “fancy script,” as she calls it, of a man who lived in Amherst from 1813 to 1821. She writes: “He speaks of Buffalo as a place unsafe because of the Canadians who were unhappy because of the War of 1812 . . . of how the building of the Erie Canal should help the economy . . . poor man, a carpenter, had to sell his horse and buggy to get money to build himself a shop to work from. He reminded me of some young people today because he was always writing home because he always needed money.” He married and they had a healthy baby, Aunt Betty said, but then his wife died of typhoid fever and he begged his parents in Connecticut to raise the baby. “It took him several years before he could find someone going to Connecticut to take the baby to his parents. In the meantime he had to find care for her and sell his shop and unfinished house to finance it. In the end, he moved west and died. His lawyer wrote the last few letters.”

Nothing seemed to turn out right for the man, Aunt Betty said.  I felt so sad hearing about his death; I might have half way believed he was one of our relatives whom Father Don Hebeler had unearthed in Bavaria – the way she wrote about him. At least he left letters -- and at least Aunt Betty is taking the time to decipher his fancy script and to understand his lifelong struggles.

I replied to my aunt today, in letter format, and told her I think the man’s letters are fascinating – and that I didn’t think she was a dinosaur at all. I wanted to tell her what I read in the newspaper – that cursive writing is no longer taught in elementary schools; that they teach "keyboarding" instead;  that in less than 100 years, it’s believed, no one alive (save for scholarly types) will know how to write in cursive. I wanted to comment about the post office considering a five-day mail delivery . . . and so we should write more letters, Aunt Betty!  But then I changed my mind, for – I’m learning this now – that is not the stuff of the proper newsy letter.

In the Making

I’ve added a tall lavender candle to the ritual of writing in the early morning – for isn’t writing a ritual just as morning prayers, or the bath, or the cup of tea for some? Ritual makes something more than what it is, assigns meaning to even the simplest of tasks such as washing clothes, or mopping a floor, or baking bread – otherwise it’s just rote work that has to be done – the tending of belly and beast.  A human might go crazy with the tedium of rote work all their lives – and that’s what housework or factory work or office work can be.  But to create a ritual is to make the ordinary more than what it is, to elevate it to the spiritual – the creative.  Because my life has been ordinary beyond choice or reason, I understand that the most commonplace, tedious work can be made into something more than itself, more than the physical scrawl.

For years I had to make games out of folding clean clothes – creating category, assigning priority, making order out of chaos, placing color next to shade – a neatly turned pile might inspire the will to bake a new bread, which might in turn create a poem – and, odd to say, but . . . folding clothes, like baking bread, is a very creative warm-up time for me now, a time when thoughts turn from chaos to order, words stack one atop another.  Something reorders and aligns itself in the brain when the body creates physical order in its environment.  I’ve never bought the idea of a messy desk as the sign of a creative person.

Three years ago, I attended a lecture and demonstration on the art of the tea ceremony. This was at the University of Richmond where I was working to attain a teacher's license so I could have meaningful and real employment as a high school English teacher. The Asian woman, a professor and guest lecturer from another university, had written a book on Asian craftsmanship and ceremony – though I can’t recall the title, or her name, just now.  It took me three years to learn to make a decent bowl of tea, she said, while the audience laughed and began to love her.  I know she said this because I took notes that evening, and wrote a long poem about her in the wee hours of the night when I couldn’t sleep . . . The tea ceremony for three or five friends might take six months for which to prepare, she told us.  The bowl of tea is not the subject of quenching thirst or of warming bellies and hands – it’s a method of transformation for the preparer as well as the partaker.

I’ve always been what people call a tea drinker – for it seems people and nations are categorized that way, as tea drinkers or coffee drinkers – and so the next morning, having not slept well as I’ve already said, I opened the kitchen tea cabinet to find my life in disarray.  For thought is influenced by vision, she said.  I emptied out the cabinet and threw away the old stale teas and organized the worthy teas; wiped out the stray leaves and crumbs that had somehow invaded or migrated there – stray thoughts, interruptions, she might have said.  And then I found the small green canister of matcha tea, bought long ago to make green tea ice cream for my family – but had never gotten around to it – and that spoke volumes to me – and so I opened the vacuum sealed tea packet and began to breathe in the verdant ground tea leaves – each smell and sound has significance, she said – and began to make the tea according to how she showed us at the university classroom – a bowl hand turned beyond the house is best, she said, and rocks polished by rainwater to cleanse the mind, and the wearing of a summer robe . . . but I did my best, taking the water’s temperature, using a rounded bowl, swirling counter-clockwise . . . and clearing extraneous thoughts from the mind – perhaps a lifetime to make a proper bowl of tea – and, as I sipped my bowl of tea – and I’m not inventing this: I suddenly really saw the smudgy kitchen window and the streaked kitchen cabinets and the cupboard doors that hadn’t closed properly in years because of warped thoughts or intentions – I mean, because of humidity or something – and the drawer of mismatched spoons that ground sawdust onto the contents of the bottom cabinet each time I opened or closed the drawer – wearing me down – I mean, the drawer, being worn down – invasions of privacy . . . crumbs . . . the disorder of mind, the straying of purpose . . . I might never have a friend over for tea, I thought.

Since that cup of matcha tea three years ago, I’ve bagged the idea of teaching high school English (although I did get the license and taught one semester),  have claimed an alignment with the thing I’ve always wanted to do – although I can’t prove it's a “marketable” choice – and it suddenly becomes clear today as I sit here with a cup of tea and the new candle flickering sprightly:  isn’t it odd that the kitchen was renovated since that epiphianic day?  The new cabinets are made of lyptus wood, one of the hardest woods on the planet – because I  will not be worn down again – and the cabinets and drawers have a kind of device that makes them close silently – for sound and smell are significant.

I began to write this morning about the lavender candle as an added ritual to the physical act of writing . . . but somehow that small thing turned into more . . . perhaps a lifetime, her voice still echoes, for the making of a bowl of tea.