Longhand

I was going through old photos and came across this little tidbit I hadn’t seen before that my mother wrote for a newspaper when she was 13 years old.

By the time she was 14, the largest Utah newspaper (some 50 miles away from her home) had hired her as a regular columnist.

This photo of her holding Aaron (a neighbor boy?) was probably taken around that time.

As a young woman she loved to fish, write, read, and hang out with her younger sister.

Love this photo of my parents on their honeymoon.

But what’s that in her hair? Another big catch?

Several years ago, while my mother was still alive, I wrote an essay that brings back lots of memories for me.

Longhand

With the help of my brother, my 83-year-old mother sent forth into the world her first
e-mail, headed my way.

Hi MaryJane,

I am staying down at Scott and Sue’s for Easter. It’s a treat whenever I am with my family. They are a love and delight for me as I continue to face a whole life without my wonderful husband, Allen. I think I am nearing a change in my attitude and beginning to enjoy time spent with my family and my special friend, Fern.  Easter was a fun day  …

When I sort through my mail and find a longhand letter from my mother, I know exactly her routine — tea, stationery, envelopes, stamps and pen; and always her search for a sunlit place to sit, usually our kitchen table. I can picture the tilt of her head and the quiet — just the sound of her pen scratching the paper and her teacup finding its saucer.

My mother was a newspaper columnist when she was 14 years old — meaning her longhand took a long time. Long before computers, even before fountain pens, her columns were delivered 50 miles, once per week, via Model T to a Salt Lake City newspaper. She wrote how-to stuff: how to be patient with a younger sibling, how to read and enjoy Shakespeare and Dickens at an early age, how to value your cousins. She did book reviews and researched things like why burning wood crackles. She gave gift suggestions and ideas for girls’ clubs.

When I left home, my pace was faster. Sure, I wrote her a few letters, but usually I called. If I did write, my style was a fast print, nothing longhand. Even my signature was a blocky print version, nothing fine and pleasing to the eye, fluid and graceful like hers. I didn’t have time for curves, a sunlit place. Tea.

All that changed one day. I was standing at a cash register in a grocery store, about to write a check, when I had the urge to slow … way … down.

I was on day two. The day before, I’d lost my house in a fire. A fire burns fast. And the chaos it creates in your head is physically everywhere — blackened mattresses in the snow, water-logged books needing immediate care, the contents of file drawers spread out in frozen puddles, a computer and copy machine in last summer’s flower bed — all of it carried out, in a hurry, by firefighters and neighbors.

While everyone stood with their grocery carts in line behind me, I turned 8 years old again, my hand trying to remember what I’d practiced in grade school — calligraphy, the alphabet on dotted lines with rounded, connected letters. Whole, complete, connected words. Control and calm. Longhand.

I’m over my fire now. I can’t even remember the year it happened, maybe 1996. For several weeks after, I had a new full-time time job — managing the chaos and filing an insurance claim. I had to remember what was missing, in detail, methodically going from room to room. Insurance companies recommend producing a videotape of all your belongings. I had to pull mine from memory. I had to do this … and I had to do that. My to-do list was unmanageable. Meanwhile, funny little things started happening. I’d be driving somewhere and I’d forget where I was going. (Moscow is a small town.) I lost my checkbook. My wallet. I lost my car keys. But the day I couldn’t remember my name when asked, I knew I was in trouble.

I headed back to the motel room where we were staying (paid for by my insurance company) and I wrote, longhand, anything — a letter to my mother, to-do lists, my insurance claim, an inventory of everything in every room that was gone, every article of clothing. I wrote slowly. I wrote with a pencil and erased what wasn’t perfect. I went shopping for the perfect pencil. I practiced my capital W over and over again until I got it right and the B in my last name. B’s are tricky for me, so are small r’s.

Someday, I’ll master real calligraphy with different pens and inks, maybe even a feather that I dip, point and guide. To this day, longhand saves me, slows me down, puts me together, all connected again.

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