The Letters That Came Home

The June I could not write

I tried anyway. Of course I tried. I am too stubborn not to.

I sat down the last week of May with the green pen and a stack of twenty-six blank cards and the ledger open beside me, and I meant to do it the way I always had.

I knew the names. I did not need to read the ledger to know them, I had been watching these particular children for four years.

But when I set the pen to the first card I could not see the line. The gray smudge sat right where the words were supposed to go, and the pen wandered, and what came out climbed uphill and ran off the edge and crossed over itself.

I tried a second card with a ruler under the line to guide my hand. It was worse. A letter that a child cannot read is not a kindness, it is a burden, one more thing they have to be gentle about.

I sat at that table for three nights running. I got exactly one card done that I was willing to mail, and it took me an hour, and it was not good, and I cried over it like a child.

On the third night my husband came and stood in the kitchen doorway, which he had not done during letter week in all our years.

He did not tell me to stop. He knew better. He just said, “Ellen, those kids got four years of you. That is the letter.”

I knew he was right and it did not help one bit.

So I did a thing I am not proud of. I told no one. The graduation came and went, and that Saturday, for the first time since nineteen eighty-eight, no letters landed in twenty-six quiet houses.

I was ashamed, which is a foolish thing to be at seventy-two about your own eyes. But there it is. I let the summer start and I kept my mouth shut and I thought that was the end of the thing I had made.