Day 34: Mila's Letters

Turgenev wrote a short piece about an old sparrow who threw itself down in front of a hunting dog to shield a fallen chick, and he ended it by saying that only love keeps life together and moving.

I read it to the class this week, because Mila asked for a story about birds.

Dear Grandmother,

Mila writes to her mother every Sunday. I knew this, because Tomas told me in the autumn, and because on Monday mornings she arrives at school with an envelope in her coat pocket and gives it to Greta at the gate. Greta takes it as if it were a parcel of eggs. She says it is the most important post of her week, and she says it in front of Mila so that Mila hears.

On Wednesday it was too cold for the yard at lunch, so the children stayed in, and Mila sat at my desk while I cut paper for the afternoon. She had her letter with her. She does not hide them. She asked me to check one word, "thaw", because she was not sure if it had a w at the end. It does. She wrote it out again in her best hand, slowly, the tip of her tongue showing, the way Dora pipes cream on a cake for a wedding. Then she asked me, quite seriously, who I write to.

I told her the truth. I said I write to my grandmother, who lives in a care home in the city and cannot read any more. Mila thought about that. She did not say, "Then why?" which is what a grown-up would say. She said, "Where do you keep them?"

So I told her about the tin. Your tin, blue, with the dent in one corner, on the shelf above my stove. She nodded as if that were a perfectly good post office.

Then we compared. Her letters go in Greta's bag, then in a van, then on a train, then in another bag, and they wait a few days in each place before her mother opens them. Mine go in a tin and wait there. "Mine wait in lots of places," she said. "Yours just wait in one." I said that was true. She said hers sometimes take two weeks to get an answer. I said mine would never get one. She considered this and said, "But you still know what she would say." And I find I do, Grandmother, most of the time.

In the afternoon I tried something with the whole class. Each child wrote a short letter to anyone they liked, a real person or an animal or a tree. Then I showed them how to fold a single sheet into its own envelope, with no glue: fold the bottom up, the sides in, the top flap down, and tuck it into the pocket the folds make. Pip wrote to his rabbit. Noor wrote to her cousin's new husband to ask what he does all day. Sofia wrote to the lake. Anyone could try it at a kitchen table with one sheet of paper. The folding takes two minutes, and the letter looks like a small present when it is done.

An aside. Before envelopes were cheap, people folded and locked their letters themselves. They cut a thin strip from the edge of the paper, threaded it through slits in the folded letter, and sealed it with wax, so that nobody could open it without tearing something. Some of these old letters were never delivered, and they still lie folded in archives today. People who study them now use scanners to read the pages inside without opening them, so the lock stays whole.

Tomas came at four to collect Mila. She showed him her folded letter to the lake, and he admired it properly, turning it over in his big hands like a pastry he had been told not to break. Then, before she had her second boot on, she told him about my tin, all in one breath, as if it were the news of the day. I felt my face go warm. Tomas did not ask anything more about it. He looked at me over her head and said only, "That sounds right to me." And I understood that he meant it.

Turgenev's sparrow was small and frightened and threw itself down anyway. Mila's letters cross the land every Sunday. Mine wait on a shelf. I think both kinds come from the same place he was writing about, the thing that keeps life together and moving even when the answer is slow or does not come.

Your Vera

Day 35: The Longest Dark

Krylov wrote a fable about a dragonfly who sang the whole summer through and only looked up when winter was already at the door.

I have been thinking that I am more like the ant this year, and I am not sure I like it.

Dear Grandmother,

It is dark when I wake and dark when I leave the classroom. The sun comes over the far shore at about half past eight, crawls along the tops of the pines, and is gone again before four. By the time the children leave, the windows of the lake town are already yellow. Mrs Varga says this is the week everyone gets quiet, and she is right. Even Leon, who never stops talking, sat at his desk today with his chin in his hands, watching the snow come down past the window like flour through a sieve.

So I tried something with the class, and it has worked better than I hoped. I pinned a long strip of paper along the wall by the stove. Every afternoon, one child looks at the clock at the exact moment the sun goes behind the pines, and writes the time on the strip in pencil. Ida does it with great ceremony. Sami checks her. We began just after the turn of the year, when the times were nearly the same each day. Now, if you look at the whole strip, you can see it: the minutes are coming back, two or three each afternoon. It is very slow, like waiting for water to boil in a big pot, but it is happening, and the children can see it with their own eyes. Anyone could do this at home on a kitchen calendar. It does not make the evenings longer. It only shows you that they are getting longer, and somehow that is enough.

Here is the aside. The shortest day came weeks ago, just before the turn of the year, and yet the coldest days are now. I asked Leon why he thought that was, and he said the sun was tired. The real reason is not so different. The ground and the lake have been giving up the warmth they stored in summer, a little each day, the way a bread oven stays warm long after the fire is raked out. For weeks after the shortest day, the land still loses more heat at night than the low sun can give back. Only when the stored warmth is spent does the turn begin to show. It always comes late. It always comes.

In the evenings I write by the stove. I have moved the kitchen table close to it and put the lamp on the corner, so that the light falls on the paper and the warmth falls on my feet. The stove ticks as it heats. Outside it is so still that I can hear the ice on the lake creak now and then, far out. I keep a pan of milk on the back of the stove, not to boil, only to stay warm, and when I finish a page I pour a little into a cup. Dora says this is what old people do. I said I am practising.

At six the bell rang, as it does, and the sound went out over the white lake and did not seem to stop anywhere. I imagine Emil on his step with his lantern, his breath going up in a cloud. Then his window light, small and steady across the dark. It is one of the lights I count now, before I sleep. His, the school lamp I leave on for the pipes, the light over Tomas's workshop. Three small fires.

I wonder what you did in these evenings, Grandmother, fifty-eight years ago, in this same kitchen with no one to write to. My mother says you always sang when you were alone in a kitchen. Mrs Varga says the lamp in this window was always the last one out in town. Perhaps both. I found a candle stub at the back of the drawer today, very old, the wax gone yellow like butter that has been kept too long. I did not throw it away.

Krylov's dragonfly sang all summer and was caught by the winter. His ant worked and was ready, and was not very kind about it. I think there is a third way to be in the dark, which Krylov did not write about. You work in the day, you sing a little in the evening, you count the minutes coming back on a strip of paper, and you keep a pan of milk warm in case someone knocks. Nobody did tonight. It was still a good evening.

Your Vera