How to Keep a Letter Warm

Fifty-Eight Unsent Letters That Will Make You Want to Write One of Your Own

A Short Quiz to Try Before Reading

This book is made of letters. Before you open the first one, here is a small quiz. It takes about ten minutes. Some questions have one right answer, and the answers are at the end of this section. Others are only about you, and nobody will mark them. Keep a pencil nearby. A pencil is better than a pen for this, and one of the questions explains why.

Question 1. The first adhesive postage stamp went on sale in May of which year: 1790, 1840 or 1901?

Question 2. Before stamps, who usually paid for a letter: the person who sent it, the person who received it, or the town where it arrived?

Question 3. Many old letters were written with an ink made from iron and the juice of oak galls. When such a letter is a hundred years old, what colour is the writing most likely to be: still black, brown, or gone completely?

Question 4. Why do words written in pencil stay readable for so long? Is it because the "lead" is really lead, because it is graphite, which light and air do not change, or because pencil marks sink deep into the paper?

Question 5. On a still evening, a bell on a lake can be heard much farther away than the same bell in a busy street. Is that mostly because the water carries the sound inside it, because the air above calm water bends the sound back down toward the shore, or because people listen more carefully near water?

Question 6. A ripe apple in a box can make the apples next to it ripen faster. What does the ripe apple give off: a gas, a juice, or heat?

Question 7. When you fold a piece of paper many times and keep it in a tin, what is the paper's worst enemy over the years: dark, damp, or being read too often?

Question 8. This one is only for you. Think of a person you can no longer send a letter to. It may be someone who has died, someone who moved far away, or someone you simply lost touch with. Write their name in the margin of this page, or on a scrap of paper. You do not need to show it to anyone.

Question 9. Also for you. If you could send that person one line, and they would read it with no misunderstanding at all, what would the line say? Do not write it yet. Only think about it, the way you think about a dish before you begin to cook it.

Question 10. Also for you. Where in your home is the warmest place that is still safe for paper? Near the stove is too hot. A sunny windowsill is too bright. Most homes have one good drawer. Do you know which one is yours?

Answers. Question 1: 1840. It was a small black stamp, and it changed letters from a costly thing into an everyday thing. Question 2: very often the person who received it. A letter could arrive with a fee to pay before you were allowed to open it, and people who had little money sometimes had to send it back unread.

Question 3: brown. Iron-gall ink goes on dark and often grows darker at first, then slowly turns brown over the years as the iron in it changes. In some very old letters the ink has even eaten small holes into the paper.

Question 4: graphite. A pencil has never held real lead. Graphite is a form of carbon, and light and air leave it almost exactly as it is, which is why a child's name written in pencil on a kitchen door frame can still be read after fifty years. That is also why the pencil was the better choice for this quiz.

Question 5: the air bends the sound. On a calm evening the air just above the cold water is cooler than the air higher up. Sound travels more slowly in the cooler layer, so the sound that rises is turned back down toward the shore instead of escaping upward. Calm water also has nothing on it for the sound to break against.

Question 6: a gas. Ripe fruit gives off a gas called ethylene, which tells nearby fruit to ripen. This is why apples kept for winter are wrapped one by one and are not allowed to touch.

Question 7: damp. Paper lasts longest in a cool, dry and dark place. Damp brings mould and stains, and light fades ink. Being read often wears out the folds, but a well-loved letter usually survives its reader.

Questions 8, 9 and 10 have no answers here. The letters in this book were written by a young teacher who also had someone she could no longer send letters to. She kept them in a dented blue tin in her kitchen. You may want to keep your answers somewhere just as safe.

Part 1: The Tin Box

A new teacher arrives in a small lake town and finds that her grandmother was there first. These are her first letters of the school year, written in the teacher's house and kept in a blue tin.

Day 1: The First Stamp

In May 1840, the first adhesive postage stamp went on sale. It was small and black, with the profile of a young queen, and it meant that the person who sent a letter paid for it, not the person who received it.

Dear Grandmother,

I bought a sheet of stamps at the bus station this morning, out of habit. I am writing to you from the kitchen of the teacher's house in the lake town. Your kitchen. Mr Okafor met me at the bus stop with a ring of keys and a folder of forms, and he said, "Your grandmother taught here once, I hear." I said yes, for one year, fifty-eight years ago. He nodded as if that were a perfectly normal thing for a family to do twice.

The house smells of dust and old wood smoke. The stove is cold. There is a table, two chairs, a bed with a thin mattress and a window that looks across the school yard to the lake. The lake is grey today and very flat, like milk in a wide pan.

The school is twenty steps from the back door. I walked across in the late afternoon and looked in through the window: one room, eleven small desks, a black stove with a crooked pipe, and a map rolled up on a hook. Behind it, in the yard, there is a round brick oven with a little iron door, cold and grey, like a loaf left out too long.

I found your tin on the high kitchen shelf above the stove, behind a stack of chipped plates. It is blue and dented on one corner, and the lid sticks. Inside are recipe cards in your handwriting, the same round letters that are on every birthday card you ever sent me. Bread with caraway. Barley soup. A jam with too much sugar, crossed out and corrected. You left it here, and in fifty-eight years nobody threw it away.

Here is the plain truth about this letter, and about the ones after it. You cannot read any more. My mother says the words will not stay still on the page for you now, and when someone reads a letter aloud, you sometimes cry and do not know why. Last month I sent you a postcard of the city park. My mother read it to you, and you asked for your own mother for the rest of the afternoon. So my mother asked me, quietly, on the phone, not to bring letters that upset you. I said I would not.

But I still want to tell you things. So I will write to you, and I will put each letter in your tin, with the recipe cards. They will not be delivered. They will be kept, the way you kept a soup recipe for a winter you had not reached yet.

Here is one small thing I tried tonight, and you could try it too, if anyone put a pen in your hand. You always began a letter with the weather. I did the same: I wrote the date at the top and then one line about the sky before anything else. It works like warming a pan before the butter goes in. The rest comes more easily after it.

While I unpacked, I thought about recipe cards. A card like yours is not really a list of amounts. It says "a teacup of flour" and means your teacup, the one with the chipped handle. It says "bake until it smells right." A family recipe only works if someone stands beside you once and shows you what right smells like. The card is a reminder, not a teacher.

School starts in two days. Eleven pupils, the folder says. I have ironed a blouse on the kitchen table, on a folded towel, because there is no ironing board. I think you would have done the same.

I keep thinking about that first stamp. Before it, the person who received a letter usually paid for it, and some people turned away letters they could not afford. After it, the sender paid, and the letter arrived already paid for, like a gift. My letters are paid for too. I have put a stamp on this envelope, and it will go into the tin anyway. Nobody has to pay to receive it, and nobody has to be upset by it. It can simply wait.

Your Vera