Turkey and Letters

Thanksgiving Day
reading our mother's letters--
steam swirls from the cup



Outside of Providence, Rhode Island three of my sisters and I and our families met for the holiday. My oldest sister Rosemary, who lives in Canada, brought down a trove of old letters from the 80s. For a while as the turkey baked, we four sisters sat around the dining room table taking turns reading them. Often we'd read sentences about ourselves--what we were doing, whether we would be coming home for Christmas.

They were both funny and sad. Funny, because my mother always wrote in non sequiturs. And you never knew what piece of news she'd place next to something totally unrelated such as "We had spaghetti for dinner. Susie is having a baby in September. Last Saturday, Dad and I looked for a new living room couch." Sad because this whole time my mother had cancer, and many of the letters documented her visits to the doctors, etc.

Reading them over twenty years later, we could see she was the glue in the family, the communicator in this pre-email, pre-social media days.

The last letter was particularly poignant. She told Rosemary that she was feeling weak, so Kathy was recording her words.

And how beautiful each of those sounded in my sister's voice.