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.