You’ve Got Mail By Laura J. Oliver

Dear Reader,

I often tell students searching for voice to write a letter to someone they trust, dead or alive, real or imagined. “Tell that person what has happened to you,” I suggest. “Cut off the salutation, and you have a story.” And we read together the famous letter written by Sullivan Ballou.

Sullivan Ballou was a member of the Rhode Island militia, a Civil War soldier who wrote a letter to his young wife Sarah from Camp Clark, Washington, DC on July 14, 1861. The word was out, he said, that the troops would be moving soon, so he was acting on impulse to write to her while he could.

Surrounded by 2,000 sleeping soldiers, he needed his wife to know that he loved her more than life itself and their two baby boys, Edgar and William, as well, yet he bore for his country a love equal in magnitude, his commitment to defend the union, a need he could not deny.

“I know how strongly American Civilization now leans on the triumph of the Government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. And I am willing — perfectly willing — to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt,” he wrote.

He tells Sarah then that his intuition is that he will survive the coming battle unharmed but asks:

“If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name. Forgive my many faults and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless and foolish I have often times been! How gladly would I wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness …

“But O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights … always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.”

Sullivan Ballou was killed a week later at the First Battle of Bull Run. He was 32, Sarah was 24. The letter was never mailed but was found when his body was recovered. Sarah lived to be 80 and never remarried.

Prescience? Intuition? Coincidence? Who can say?

When I was 13, I received the only letter ever written to me by my grandfather and, as far as I know, the only letter he ever wrote individually to any of his grandchildren. Granddad was a gentle soul with a very round face, wire-rim glasses, blue eyes, and a soft-spoken demeanor.

My grandparents lived on the Florida Gulf Coast, and I had visited them twice. They had also spent a summer with us in Maryland when my parents were building our house on the river. Grandad was a skilled carpenter, and his talents were useful to his son. But my grandfather and I were kindred spirits.

He was an astronomer—constructing a 100-power, 6-foot-long telescope to study the heavens. It took him a year just to grind the lens. He was a paleontologist who collected fossils that predated the age of dinosaurs and a numismatist, with a coin collection hidden in a secret closet that housed the oldest penny in the US (1783), a widow’s mite (a coin from the time of Christ), and a three-legged buffalo nickel. I study astronomy, search for fossils, go on archeological digs, and still possess a portion of his coin collection.

But on October 20 of my 13^th year, I received this letter. “Hello, Laura, my dear. You may be surprised to hear from me. I don’t write very much. I’m lonesome to see you,” he began. He said his spelling was so poor that he seldom wrote anything at all and that if the letter were flawless when I received it, I’d know my schoolteacher grandmother had gotten hold of it before it was mailed. It was almost flawless but “lonesome” was spelled “lonesume.” I am grateful to know that it arrived untouched.

“I wish you could come visit for a whole six weeks next summer,” he wrote, “but if not, we may come to Maryland to see you.”

He enclosed $6 as “early Christmas” so I could buy myself a present “to Laura from Grandad.” And he signed the letter simply, “I love you very much.”

I love you very much. Some instinct made me save this letter, but I’m only coming to appreciate the significance of the timing now.

Because Grandad was as prescient as Sullivan Ballou. There was no visit the following summer, and I never saw him again. He was killed six weeks later, on December 16^th , walking on the side of the road, by a hit-and-run driver.

How is it that the only letter he would ever write to a grandchild, and one that specifically told me I was loved, was sent weeks before he died in a freak accident no one could have predicted? And that although I was a child, I would keep those words safe for half a century?

We are a letter-saving family. I have correspondence written in 1848 between my great-great-grandfather and his son as they emigrated west, letters exchanged every day of World War II between my parents, letters from my mother in college back to the farm, letters of apology, acknowledgment, and connection. As my mother wrote in a letter she slipped into my suitcase the night I left for college, “It has been my experience that this kind of love never dies.”

I plan to watch over those I love from wherever I am in this life or the next. When a grandchild finds a faded letter and marvels at the familial love that preceded him in the march of generations, may it be gentle evidence of my spirit passing by. A breath, a breeze, a blessing.

So write your love down, dear reader, and save what you receive. Every letter is a love letter, if not for this generation, then for those to come.

Love,

Laura

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.