Day 58: How to Keep a Letter Warm

Before you read this last letter, try something small. Take a pen and any scrap of paper; the back of an envelope will do. Write one line to someone you can no longer send a letter to. Only one line. Fold it once, and put it somewhere warm: a coat pocket, a drawer near the stove, the pages of a book you love.

That is all. Nobody needs to read it.

Dear Grandmother,

It is the first week of July. The school is closed and smells of floor polish. The garden by the south wall has gone wild in the good way: the beans have found the string, the marigolds have opened, and the row of peas has been eaten by boys before it was ready, just as Mrs Varga promised it would be. Your lilac is finished for the year. It will come again.

I am staying. I signed Mr Okafor's papers in June, and he shook my hand on the bus step and nearly missed the bus. In September I will sign the old register too, under my spring line, in blue ink that is still blue. Eleven children will come back. Pip will be seven.

Today I put the house in order. My mother came on the morning bus to help, and we washed the windows and beat the rugs on the line, and at noon we ate bread and cheese standing up in the kitchen, the way you used to, she says, when there was too much to do to sit down. She is easier with me now. She is easier with herself. She asked to see the letters, and I let her hold the four bundles in their kitchen string, but she did not untie them. "They're yours," she said. "And hers." Then she put them down very gently, as if they were warm from the oven.

I put the bundles in the drawer of the kitchen table, the one nearest the stove. Then I took the recipe tin, which has been my letter box since September, and put it back on the shelf above the stove, where a recipe tin belongs. The cards are inside again, standing up in their old order. Barley soup. Dumplings. Honey bread. Plum cake, for E. Emil's envelope lies flat at the back, behind the cards, still sealed. The lid closes now. It has a dent in it that I know by heart.

I read something this spring about how old papers are kept in the places that keep them carefully. They are not kept warm at all. They are kept cool, dry and dark, in boxes, away from the sun. Heat and damp make paper yellow and weak; light fades ink. If you want a letter to last a hundred years, you treat it like flour in a cold larder. I believe all of this. And still I put my letters by the stove. Because the warmth I mean is a different warmth. A letter stays warm when it is kept near the people who wrote it, and handled now and then, and spoken of. Emil's letter was kept cold in a drawer for fifty-eight years. It is warmer now, among your recipes, where it can hear the kettle.

At six, Tomas and Mila came down the road with a basket, and we walked to the ferry house together. Emil rang the bell, once. The sound went over the water and came back. We sat on the bench by the landing and ate the last of a plum cake, with the plums nearly all at the top, because I have learned. Tomas held my hand, plainly, in front of everyone, which was only Emil and the ducks. Emil looked at our hands and then at the lake and said nothing, and that was a kind of blessing.

When I came home I did the small thing myself. I took one of your blank recipe cards from the bottom of the tin, the ones you never used, and wrote one line on it. It does not matter what. It is to you. I put it in the tin among the others, between the plum cake and the honey bread, and closed the lid, and put the tin back above the stove, which I still light in the evenings for tea.

That is how to keep a letter warm, I think. You write the line. You fold it once. You put it somewhere near the fire, near the bread, near the people. Then you go on living in the same house as it, and every so often you put your hand on the tin as you pass, the way you put your hand on a sleeping child.

If anyone ever finds this tin, as I found it, I hope they will take out a card, and turn it over, and write a line of their own.

Your Vera

A Note from the Author

I began this book on the back of a recipe card. It was a card for a plain apple cake, written by a woman in my family who had long since stopped baking, and on the back, in the same hand, someone had added two words that had nothing to do with apples. I never found out who they were meant for. I only knew that the card had been kept, and kept warm, near a stove, for a very long time.

Vera's letters grew out of that card. I wanted to write about the things we say to people when they can no longer answer, and about how a small town remembers its teachers long after the teachers have forgotten the town. I also wanted to write about love that arrives quietly, the way bread rises when nobody is watching it.

If you finish the book and find yourself holding a pen, I will be glad. You do not have to post what you write.

A Short Timeline

Fifty-eight years ago, at the end of August: Anna Sorel, twenty-two, crosses the lake on the ferry as the lake town's new teacher.

That autumn: Anna learns to bake plum cake in the kitchen of the ferry house and dances with Emil Haas, the ferryman's son, at the autumn dance in the village hall.

That winter: the ferry is frozen in. Anna walks across the ice to her pupil Marta on the far shore, and Emil walks behind her.

That spring: Anna crosses the lake for the last time and leaves to marry Paul Lind in the city. Emil writes her a letter and never posts it.

Twenty years ago: the ferry stops running. Emil keeps the ferry house and goes on ringing the bell at six every evening.

Twelve years ago: Paul Lind dies. In later years Anna's memory illness begins, and she moves to a care home in the city.

This year, in September: Vera Lind, twenty-five, becomes the new teacher of the same school and finds Anna's recipe tin. She writes her first letter (Day 1).

Autumn: Vera meets Tomas Brandt and his daughter Mila, meets Emil, and learns the story of Anna's year (Days 4 to 23).

Winter: first snow, the winter play from Anna's old script, and a walk on the thick ice near the shore (Days 24 to 35).

Late winter: Anna has a fever and spends days in hospital. Emil visits Room Twelve, and Anna says his name (Days 36 to 42).

Late March: Anna dies peacefully in the night (Day 47) and is buried by the lake, among the birches near the ferry house (Day 48).

Spring and early summer: Emil gives Vera his unposted letter, Vera agrees to stay for a second year, and the school year ends (Days 53 to 58).

The People in This Book

Vera Lind, the new teacher of the lake town school and the writer of every letter in this book.

Anna Lind, born Sorel, Vera's grandmother, the teacher of the same school fifty-eight years earlier.

Lena Lind, Vera's mother and Anna's daughter.

Paul Lind, Anna's husband and Vera's grandfather.

Emil Haas, the son of the old ferryman and later the ferryman himself, who rings the ferry bell every evening at six.

Tomas Brandt, a carpenter in the lake town, and his daughter Mila, one of Vera's pupils.

Greta, the postwoman; Dora, the school cook; Mrs Varga, Kostya's grandmother and once one of Anna's pupils.

Hanne, a nurse at the care home; Mr Okafor, the head of the district schools.

Vera's pupils: Kostya, Noor, Mila, Ari, Sofia, Leon, Ida, Sami, Bea, Pip and Yuri.

Marta, a pupil of Anna's on the far shore of the lake, fifty-eight years ago.