Letter # 1: Ft. Myers FL, April 15, 1945

I have a feeling these are not in order. I am tempted to pull them all out of the box and reorganize them by date. But then, this is how my grandmother left them - stuffed tightly into a bright yellow Disney Tigger photo memory box. I am hesitant to mess with them, even touching them seems invasive. When I open the box for the first time, I breathe in the mustiness of old paper, like an ancient library book. It reminds me of being up in the stacks in college, pouring through novels and literary criticism in its original form. Emails do not have a scent.

I pull out the first letter and inspect the envelope first. It was sent via airmail to "Miss Marilyn Jewett, 220 Ashley Street, Hartford, Connecticut." An air mail stamp cost 8 cents - it is green with a picture of a plane on it. The envelope is not a special air mail one (with the red and blue stripes) but my grandfather wrote "air mail" on it twice in print, underlined two times. He addressed the envelope in cursive writing.

Ah, cursive writing - a slowly diminishing art form. I don't know anyone who writes in script anymore. So when I open the first letter, pulling out the thin, delicate pages and see that my grandfather has scrawled his letters in messy script, I realize that it will be a challenge at first to read them. As I decipher the first one, it almost feels as if I am translating them. Plus, the order of the pages is odd, so it is difficult to read the words in order, as he wrote them.

But I persevere. And I learn a few things. He missed being able to drink 2 quarts of milk a day (they were only allowed 8 oz.). He missed partying. He thought if she gained 15-20 lbs. she would "slay them" but loved her just the way she was. He was sad because he hadn't received any letters from her and two from his mother. He missed my grandmother terribly and was very lonely.

He called her "Lynn." I have never heard her called anything but Marilyn, so this comes as a bit of a surprise at first, and it sets in - these letters were written before I was born, before my mother was born, before any of my aunts and uncles were born. They are letters written by a man formally called C.W. Libby to a young woman he called "Lynn." He signed every letter "Tate." Suddenly, these are not my grandparents but two young lovers separated from each other...Lynn and Tate....