I received a letter from myself, sent more than twenty years earlier…almost thirty-eight years actually, if I give in and do the math…but that seems an impossible number, doesn’t it? Unfathomable, really. Thirty-eight years? Holy moly. Time is a crushing thing.
My letter moved like a slo-mo boomerang, sent out into the world then doubling back, finding its way into my own hands.
I was twenty when I wrote the letter, pen on paper. Without self-consciousness or editing a word I sent it off to Michigan, addressed to a low, cold and sometimes leaking white stucco ranch house down a dirt driveway off the side of the highway; a house that sat on an acre and a half of midwestern fields, land graced with an apple orchard, a cherry tree, a willow—land covered in old cars, vintage cars, car parts and parts-cars, hulls and car carcasses. Most of the cars were hidden, strategically surrounded by stacked firewood, the wood salvaged from the surrounding fields, in municipal and commercial lots where developments had been going in. On that land, as kids, we’d run wild.
By the time I saw my own letter again, the white stucco house had long since been razed. There’s no address at our old driveway now, not really. The earth is mostly trapped under asphalt. The footprint of our house is smothered under a Home Depot’s side parking lot. I’ve been back to see it twice. Standing in the parking lot, I could spot some of our old trees. To see those particular trees, with the reach of their arms, was like seeing old friends—and to see actual old friends, dear friends from high school, was a dream—but our old former wilderness is pretty much now one more patch of corporate chain stores, fast food and suburban sprawl.
My father kept this letter I’d written, and so many more, from the day he got it through the rest of his life. He must’ve brought it with him from Michigan, when he moved back to Oregon, back into his mother’s tiny house, the house where he’d grown up. He brought it along again when he moved into another house, the house I’d found for him, where I hoped he’d live a better, more comfortable life—and I’d say he did—the two-bedroom bungalow he still called home up until he passed away last summer. He kept the letter like a precious thing.