OLD LETTERS FOR THE NEW YEAR

  

Here's a Language Matters Column from several years back.  It still speaks to me, and I hope to you, as well.

NEW YEAR'S EVE SUNSET

   

Happy New Year!

Old Letters for the New Year 

By Kathryn Stripling Byer 

Lately, my brother and I have been exploring the contents of the attic in the house where we 

grew up. We greeted this new year without my father’s presence, and perhaps that is why we 

have felt so drawn to what remains of our ancestors whose books, letters, journals, and articles of 

clothing rest in the attic like relics. 

We found century-old letters from our great-grandparents and one letter from a great-great- 

grandfather writing from County Clare, Ireland, in 1869, telling his son Will how proud he 

would always be of him. We found another from his daughter, Nell, speaking of our great- 

grandfather’s childhood and early manhood, written to his wife, my great-grandmother Ella 

Valentine Fry, after her husband’s death. My great-grandmother was quite a letter-writer herself, 

educated well enough to become a teacher at age 16 in the Lead City, South Dakota schools, the 

first female so “nominated” to that post. My brother and I unfolded each of these letters as if 

they were the most precious items in the house. Each one was written with care, the handwriting 

graceful, the language itself literate in both style and grammar. These letters obviously mattered 

a great deal to both the authors and the recipients. Now, more than a century later, they speak to 

us in ways we’ve only begun to appreciate. 

Who among us writes letters like this anymore, I wondered, as I read the words that flowed from 

those long-ago pens, the ink fading, but the language still vibrant? Whose handwriting could 

match theirs? Not mine. I type my letters, my handwriting increasingly unreadable and hurried. 

Or, like more and more of us, I email my correspondence. With the click of a mouse, I send my 

messages. I do not labor with a dip pen to put into durable words my love for a child gone to the 

new world to become a miner in South Dakota. My messages are nothing like the letters we 

found by a sister writing across the Atlantic about her dead brother’s love of tools and 

engineering. Like so many of us, I am in a hurry. My correspondence is fleeting, disposable. 

Most of it will be deleted. 

In his poem “Please Write: Don’t Phone,” Robert Watson, my former teacher in the UNC-G 

writing program, exhorts, “Let us write instead: surely our fingers spread out / With pen on paper 

touch more of the mind’s flesh.” He explains, “I can touch the paper you touch,” and “I can read 

you day after day.” His last lines continue to haunt me: “I hold the envelope that you addressed 

in my hand. / I hold the skin that covers you.” 

In this new year of email and instant-messaging, few seem to have time to sit down and put their 

lives onto paper that can be unfolded again and again, or placed in a drawer for safe-keeping. 

The flesh of my family’s past resides in those yellowing sheets of paper we found in the attic. I 

carry their words into the new year, resolved to write more letters in long-hand, letting the words 

rise slowly to the surface and take shape on the empty page like a gift to be cherished. 

FRY FAMILY GRAVESTONE, CORBALLY CHURCHYARD, IRELAND