Day 44: The Tin Opened

Charlotte Brontë gave these words to a girl in one of her novels: "Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs."

My mother and I needed a whole afternoon to learn it.

Dear Grandmother,

My mother came to the lake town on Saturday. She wanted to see the school this time, she said, because in the winter she had seen only the house, and the bus was cheaper than the petrol. I think she also wanted to see me somewhere without nurses walking past. I showed her the classroom, and the bread oven in the yard. Back in the kitchen she went straight to the door frame and touched your initials, like greeting an old friend.

I left her in the kitchen while I fetched wood. When I came back she was standing at the shelf with your blue tin open in her hands. She had wanted the card for your barley soup. She had found the cards, and under the cards, my letters. Forty-three of them, folded in half, each with "Dear Grandmother" showing at the top.

"I thought you wrote one or two," she said. "I thought it was a phase."

I said nothing. I could see that she had read one. It was lying open on the table, and I knew which one from the shape of the paragraphs. It was the letter I wrote after our argument on the telephone in the autumn, about the frost on the reeds and about her.

"You wrote that I am afraid," she said. "To my own mother. Behind my back."

"I wrote it to Grandmother," I said. "Not about you. To her." Then I heard how little difference that made, and we both stopped.

It was a hard hour. She said the letters were a way of keeping you for myself. I said they were the only way I had of talking to you that did not upset you. She said every Sunday upset her, and that she had done the Sundays alone for three years. I said I knew. I said I was sorry. She said she was sorry too, and that she was tired, and then she sat down at the kitchen table and put her face in her hands. I put the kettle on, because in our family that is what you do with your hands when you do not know what to do with anything else.

When the tea was made, I tried something. I took two blank recipe cards from the back of your tin and gave her one. On each card we wrote two lines: one thing we were sorry for, and one thing we were thankful for. Nothing more. Then we swapped. Hers said she was sorry for calling my letters a phase, and thankful that I had sat with you in the hospital so that she could sleep. Mine said I was sorry for writing about her and not to her, and thankful for every Sunday. You could try it with anyone after a quarrel. The card is small on purpose. There is no room on it for a speech.

Afterwards she read three more letters, with my permission this time. One about the plum cake. One about Emil and the photograph. One about Mila spelling words with her finger in flour on a tray. She laughed at the flour. She cried at the waltz. "She would have loved these," she said. "Before." I said I thought you still might, in your own way, if someone read them to you slowly. She did not say no. She said, "Not all at once."

Tins are good keepers, I told her, mostly to fill the quiet. A tin is not really tin at all. It is thin sheet iron with a coat of tin on it, because tin does not rust, and it was first made that way to carry food a long way without spoiling. Biscuits came in painted tins for many years, and the tins were too pretty to throw away, so in house after house they ended up holding buttons, needles, seeds and letters. My mother said that was a very teacherish thing to say. Then she put our two cards into the tin, on top of the letters, and closed the lid herself, pressing it down all round the way you press the lid on a jar of jam.

Charlotte Brontë's girl was right. We could have spent the whole afternoon keeping count, and we nearly did. Life is too short for that, and you are the proof of it, Grandmother: so much of your life has gone quiet, and what is left is the kindness, not the wrongs. My mother and I have decided to keep the same things you kept.

Your Vera

Day 45: The Ice Goes Out

Henry David Thoreau, writing about spring at his pond in the woods, said that we need the tonic of wildness.

This week the lake gave us a full spoonful of it.

Dear Grandmother,

The ice went out on Wednesday. It had been grey and soft for days, with dark water showing along the reeds, and on Tuesday night the wind turned and came from the south, warm and wet. In the morning the whole lake was talking.

I heard it from the classroom before the first lesson. A long groan, then a crack like a plate dropped on a stone floor, then a sound I can only describe as a giant pouring sugar into a bowl. Pip ran to the window. Then everyone ran to the window. Yuri said the lake was hungry. Bea said it was the lake turning over in bed.

I gave up on the spelling lesson. We put on coats and boots and walked down to the shore, all eleven of us in a line, and stood well back on the dry bank by the ferry house, where the ground is high and safe.

This is what we tried, and what anyone near water or wind, or even a busy street, could try. Back in the classroom, each child drew one sound they had heard by the shore. Not the lake, the sound. Yuri drew a zigzag. Bea drew a row of tiny bells. Leon drew a big round mouth. Pip drew a dog, because a dog had barked on the far shore, and he said that counted. Then we pinned them up and guessed whose sound was whose, which was harder than it looked and much louder.

Emil came out of the ferry house while we were standing there. He did not come near the children. He stood on his step with his hands in his pockets and watched the ice the way a cook watches milk that is about to boil. When I walked over, he said, "Eighty springs I have seen this. Every one is different." Then he said, "She liked this day. She let the children out of school for it. Same as you."

I did not know that. It is not in the register. It is the kind of thing a register never says. I asked him how he knew, and he said he had been on the landing that morning, helping his father with the ropes, and had seen a row of children on the bank with their teacher, all of them with their mouths open. "Same as yours," he said.

Ice groans, I read later in an old book from the school cupboard, because it is never still. All winter it grows and shrinks with the weather, a little thicker on a cold night, a little thinner in the sun, and it pushes against the shore and against itself. When it pushes too hard, it cracks, and the crack can run across a whole lake in a moment. The sound travels through the ice faster than through the air, so it sings and booms and whistles. In spring the ice fills with water and breaks into long thin crystals, like candles standing on end, and when the wind pushes them together they tinkle against each other. That was the sugar sound. That was Bea's row of bells.

By the afternoon there was open water from the ferry house to the point. By evening the last floes were piled on the north shore, white and grey, like plates stacked after a big dinner. At six Emil rang the bell, and for the first time since the autumn the sound went out over water instead of ice. It sounded different. Softer, and further.

Tomas came to the school gate at the end of the day to collect Mila, and stood with me at the fence for a while, looking. He said every spring he feels he can breathe again, as if someone has opened a window in a steamy kitchen. I said I felt the same. Mila ran ahead to show her drawing to Emil, who held it at arm's length and nodded at it gravely. Then Tomas and I both stopped talking, because the lake was saying enough.

Thoreau was right about the tonic. I came home with wet boots and a clear head for the first time in weeks. I thought of you at twenty-two, letting your class out to watch, standing on the same bank in the same wind. Some good things come in no bottle and no jar. This one came as a whole lake, and it was free.

Your Vera