The Letters My Mother Never Delivered
Sixty Three Letters In Order
I took the box home. I did not open a single envelope in my mother’s house, and I could not tell you the reason except that it felt like the wrong building.
Then I sat at my own table for two nights and opened them in order by postmark, and I read a woman’s handwriting fall apart over two years.
Her name was Arlene Yellow Hawk. She was Winona’s mother. She was twenty nine years old when she wrote the first one, and she lived in a town called Verdell, four hours west of us, past the river.
The first letters are practical and they are hopeful and they are, I think, the hardest ones to read, because she does not know yet.
October 1987. She tells Winona that she has the apartment now, a real one with two bedrooms, and that the second bedroom is hers, and that there is a window in it that looks at the water tower. She tells her she got the job at the school kitchen, seven to two, so she will be home when school lets out. She tells her she is going to the eight week class on Thursdays and she has not missed one and there are two left. She asks her to please write back and tell her about her teacher.
That is what I mean about the hardest ones. She is not begging in October. She is reporting. She is a woman going down a list somebody handed her, checking things off, expecting the list to work.
November 1987. She asks if Winona got the last one. She says she will keep the letters coming every week so there is always one.
December 1987. She has sent a package separately and she wants to know if it came. It was a pair of gloves and a drawing pad, because Winona draws.
I sat at my table at one in the morning in the year 2026 and read a mother ask whether a drawing pad arrived, and I do not know what happened to that package, and I never will, and that is one of the two or three things from this that I am going to carry.
January 1988. The tone changes for the first time. She asks whether Winona is angry with her. She says she would understand if she was. She says she is not going to ask her to write if she does not want to, and then, two lines later, she asks her to please write.
March 1988. The class is finished. She has the certificate. She has taken the certificate to the county twice.
May 1988. She names people. This is the letter that matters legally, and I did not know that when I read it, I only knew it hurt. She writes that Grandma Agnes asks about her every single day and has moved the good chair so it faces the road. She writes that Aunt Lila has a room and Aunt Dorothy has a room. She writes, and I am quoting this one because I have it in front of me, that there are four beds in this family with her name on them.