I reached into the chest to feel those soft wool blankets and to allow my curiosity to take me deeper. Under the blankets were portraits in cardboard frames of her brothers as young men in the 1930s, books about the history of Timmins and Cochrane, towns where we had lived, and her dark blue hand-made crepe wedding dress. At the very bottom, underneath the broken lid of a pink chocolates box was the disorganized mound of the letters we had been forbidden to read.
One letter with her familiar hand writing encouraged me to continue. I reached for it, read a few phrases and dropped it back into the pile. “No time”, I thought, “Not helpful to me now, too much work, what for anyway?” I dropped the letter back into the mound, closed the lid, returned the key to my hiding place and walked away. The year was 1984.
Fading Resistance
Still, both the letters and the fact that Mom had left them to me niggled at my consciousness. “Why,” I continued to ask, “did she leave those letters to me?” Growing up she had always urged me to write the family history. In return, she had received the scoffs of a self-involved teen. Now I found myself thinking what did I really know about the family they had left behind in the Gatineau Valley in the 1930’s, what did I really know about their early life, but most importantly, what could I possibly do with those letters?
Time slid by, years, then decades and suddenly and surprisingly I turned 70. Over those years I had used the chest to store winter blankets and had always kept it in a living area knowing that basement dampness could cause damage to the cedar and the letters, the weight of which grew in my mind and tugged at my heart. Entering my eighth decade got my attention in a whole new way: I knew these are my last years and if I was going to explore those love-letters I’d better do it soon. Mom had many expressions that flowed in her speech. One of them, “You’d better get at it” grew noisier and noisier and began to erode my resistance.
The Battle
Why resist? Why proceed? Why bother? I continued to wrestle with these questions as I moved ever so slowly towards taking ownership of the letters. The “mortal sin” prohibition against reading the letters no longer had power since I had long ago ceased to be a practicing Catholic. While the threat of mortal sin might keep a conforming child away, that labelling could pique the curiosity in an adult. However, curiosity had not driven me any closer to reading the letters.
