That box was a parchment color festooned with a print, wild squiggles of red and black and green and yellow and pink and gold. Even her favorite color, squiggles of turquoise blue. Right in the center on top, the label was pasted, almost as large as the box, Yardley's Old English Lavender. The picture on it like an English painting, a young woman in an olden time dress, modest way down past her knees, an apron around her waist. A pastoral look, a basket with greens overflowing on her wrist, her other hand reaching out toward two small children. The grace of the woman, she was like Mom. When I was a kid, everyone would say how pretty she was with her round face, gentle ways, and fluffy brown hair. I remember her hands, the whiteness of her skin, the blue of her veins, that simple gold wedding ring with the tiny chips of diamond.
At the bottom of the label, 33 Old Bond Street London. England. No wonder the box was so special to her. Back then, the 1930s, the soap inside coming from so far away, it must have been quite expensive. My Depression-era Mom, how she would save everything. I almost expected to find the soaps inside.
My hands more than shook now, they trembled when I lifted the box out of the little metal safe. Light in weight, nothing rattling inside. The size was just right. Once, when I was a child, I'd snooped in my mother's bureau when everyone was away. At the bottom of a big deep drawer, I'd found a box like this, no metal safe, just the box. Inside, there was a ribbon hinge that opened to reveal not soap, but a number of letters. The box just the right size for small envelopes. I could tell by the handwriting, by the 'y' with the disconnected tail at the bottom, the way Dad wrote, some little flourish, that they were from him. It was addressed to Mom but that was as far as I got. The noise of someone at the back door, and I'd chucked the letter in the box, buried it in the drawer and run to my own room. The last I'd ever seen of it.
And, now, this lonely Christmas Eve, had I found that very same box? My fingers careful, I pulled the lid open. A little gold ribbon each side, the hinges I remembered. More gold squiggles printed on the cover inside, the regal stamp of British royalty, two lions flanking a crown."By appointment. Yardley London." Not even a faint smell of lavender anymore. Something much better. Those envelopes.
A whole stack of them. I took the top one out, addressed to Miss Helen Romer in Seattle, Washington. The postmark Kenosha, Wisconsin. The postage just three cents. The date Sept 8, 1939. Now, as an adult, I realized what they represented, love letters from Dad to Mom at the start of their relationship.
I had to sit down on the edge of the bed, my head dizzy at the idea of what I'd found. Here was a possible way to not only touch my parents again but to touch them as they were at the beginning, way before even I existed. The small box in my lap, my fingers lifted out the envelopes, all brown with age and worn from being handled. How often had she gone back to these letters, I wondered, throughout their stormy life together.
I stood up and put the box down on the bed and counted. Fifteen of them, all the same size, in chronological order. All plump with pages of writing in my Dad’s heavy handwriting. They ended at the end of October. Dad came out to marry Mom in November after their whirlwind courtship that started during a two-week vacation when Mom traveled with her folks to the Midwest to visit his family, old friends from Poland.
I learned as I unfolded sheet after sheet of his forceful writing that the first letter almost didn't get to her. Dad had transposed the numbers in her address, causing some delay, the correct one penciled over by some diligent postman of long ago. This whole end of a saga that I was now mourning, why even the existence of my own life, could not have happened for that slip of address.
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