The Letters That Came Home

The sack on the porch

For thirty-eight years I mailed a handwritten letter to every graduating senior in our little town, nine hundred and forty of them, and the June my eyes gave out and I could not write the last class, the mail carrier delivered a sack of letters addressed back to me.

My name is Ellen Marsh. I am seventy-two years old. I taught English at our high school for most of my life, and I have lived in the same white house on Sycamore my whole marriage.

The sack came on a Tuesday. I remember because Tuesday is the slow day on our route, and Denny usually just drops the mail in the box by the road and waves if he sees me in the window.

That morning he climbed the porch steps and knocked.

I came to the door in my apron with flour on my hands, because I was making a pie crust I could feel my way through better than I could see it.

Denny had a canvas sack over his shoulder. The gray kind they haul out at Christmas when the catalogs come. He set it down on the porch boards like it had weight to it.

“Miss Marsh,” he said. He has called me that since he was in my sophomore class in ninety-six. “I think you better sit down for these.”

I told him I did not have time to sit, I had a crust going hard.

He said the crust would keep.

Then he opened the top of that sack and tipped it so I could see down into it, and it was full of envelopes. Hundreds of them. Every single one addressed to me, in handwriting, no two hands the same.

I put my floury hand over my mouth and I did not say anything for a while.