Letters from my Sister

I have been reading the letters my sister Daun and I wrote to each other from 1968, when I headed off to college, to 2002, when she died at age 49 of cancer. Her voice comes through so clearly, more clearly really than in the few recordings we have of her, and she had a gorgeous voice.

As I read, she makes me laugh all over again, as she does in this one, at age 17, reporting on being called into the high school principal’s office along with her friend over a national protest against the Vietnam War that they had planned to launch on their homeroom radio show that fall of 1969: Tom and I spent an hour there while he [the principal] censored our program and asked questions. If he could only stay on track! Would you believe that while talking about the moratorium, he went everywhere from candy sales to prostitutes. The program is cancelled, and I am sending it to you – don’t lose it ‘cause we only got one copy.

The attached script is a very trenchant statement for that time and place. It’s a shame the student body didn’t get to hear it.

By Emily Darrer

Each paragraph of that twelve-page, pencil-written letter from Daun brings back a million details. Twelve pages was nothing unusual for a letter circulating in my family. ‘You people write notes to each other the length of books,’ a friend once said to me, bewildered at the note I left on the kitchen table for the Kendig clan.

There’s a homemade Valentine I sent to her, a red heart-shaped doily, with these lines in black in the centre: And we can love by letters so and gifts, And thoughts and dreams. – John Donne So it must be from the winter of 1971, when I was taking a Donne course. There are many cards, actually, and she suggests that I finish my master’s thesis because she has purchased the perfect card to send me to celebrate its completion. She could stand at card counters for ages, elbowing strangers there and handing them a card. ‘Read this one,’ she’d say. ‘It’s hilarious.’

“I have been thinking of handwriting, too, how much I did then, how very little I do now. Recent brain research seems to be telling us that nothing registers in the brain like a handwritten note.”

I actually perused the letters today because I woke at 4 a.m., thinking of Daun and my whole family, how distant we have become with both Daun and my mother dead, and we three the main letter writers of us six. My mother actually wrote me a letter every weekday my first year in college, when I was nearly dying of homesickness.

I have been thinking of handwriting, too, how much I did then, how very little I do now. Recent brain research seems to be telling us that nothing registers in the brain like a handwritten note. I have to say that none of the many, many, many emails I have written this week can hold a candle that burns at both ends to any one of my handwritten letters to my sister, but while our first letters to each other were handwritten, I see how they then became typed on typewriters, then word processed. Several folders I opened and stuffed right back in the file, one with notes and pictures from her five-year-old daughter during the last two years of her life, pages and pages and pages between her and her first husband during their long wrenching break-up and divorce. The hundreds of emails she wrote to friends during her illness. Too much. I just carried up and out and read the ones between her and me. Some of them. They’d all take another lifetime.

Our letters were written with a wink to a sister. She’s been winking at me and twinkling to herself all this afternoon, as have I, showing off our reading lists and our dogs’ antics, wondering about our parents, arguing about money, describing menus and performances, griping against wars and injustice.

They go on and on, as emails do not. They contain pressed flowers and cartoons from The Far Side, and Doonesbury. They go on as later, when we had adult paychecks, we used to talk on the phone for hours and hours on Saturdays, then hang up and call back for the one thing we’d forgotten to tell, still sending letters during the week.

So many of the letters end with P.S.s and P.P.Ss, as though we couldn’t bear to let the correspondence close. Sometimes the P.S.s were as long as the letters that began, ‘This is a short note until we talk Saturday…’ Our P.S.s could be letters in and of themselves. A one-liner of a P.S. just leapt out at me as was trying to leave the folder yesterday afternoon. At the end of a three-page, typed single-space letter, she had neatly half-written, half-printed this P.S. in bright green ink after the signature: There are lilac bushes all up and down the street and it’s all you can smell. Heaven.

By Diane Kendig. Diane’s five poetry collections include Prison Terms (2017.) She has published prose and poetry in journals such as J Journal, Under the Sun, and Wordgathering. Find her online here.