Dear Gen: A love letter

Chapter One

My memory of your funeral is not my fondest, and I doubt you like it any more than I do. By the way, did you see me from wherever you are now?

I always knew you as Nanny, not Gen. "Nanny" invokes this memory of you, a shriveled up old lady in a box.

Reading the letters, though, I envision someone else: a feisty, petite Irish girl, twenty years young, strutting along the San Francisco sidewalk to the corner of Grant and Geary streets. You're gabbing with your chickee girlfriends on your way to work at Livingston's Department Store at the corner of Grant and Geary streets. Your hair is no longer white, but dark brown, curly, and bobbed, as wasthe style in the Roaring Twenties. When I read all those letters you saved, this is the girl I see. I like this version of you a bit better, so I hope it's okay if I call you Gen. Please excuse your great-granddaughter's informality.

Oh yes, the letters. I'm reading them. I hope you don't mind. Tracey, one of your granddaughters—you remember her, right? Of course you do—wanted to share them with me, thinking I would enjoy reading them. I was in an odd spot in my life where I was feeling a bit...lost.

You know what it's like to feel lost, don't you Gen? Where you're at a crossroads and you don't know which direction to take, so you just step off the path and keep walking, walking, walking, one foot in front of the other, toward something, but you don't know yet? I was that kind of lost.

One night when we had the letters all spread out, organizing them and drinking wine—Milliare Simply Red for her and Chatom's Semillon for me—Tracey said, "Becca, I don't think you're lost. I think you're searching."

Searching for what, though?

Regardless, the letters gave me something to do, a project. As we worked, Tracy told me stories about how you would often bring out these letters for her to read. These letters seem to be some of your most cherished possessions, because they held your most beloved memories. These letters told the story of how you met him.

It was serendipitous, really. One of your friends Helen Hallinan proved to be the missing link that led you to Calaveras County. If you hadn't met her, I doubt you would have ever found your way here to the sleepy foothills. She brought you up in July of 1924 while she visited relatives. The landscape shifted from towering buildings to teetering pines as you traveledfrom San Francisco to a weekend in the country. Do you remember, Gen?

You two drove up the twisting Highway 26, then just a leftover wagon trail from the Gold Rush, up into West Point, California to go to a picnic. I like to imagine you sticking your head out the window from the frontpassenger seat of speeding car into the wind, hollering at the top of yourlungs. Helen or someone else was probably driving; along with not knowing theway, you were also a terrible driver.

Stemming off to the right of Highway 26 is Winton Road, which eventually leads to Lily Gap. This place isn't marked anywhere on the road, aside from ambiguously on a map I found. Not that you'd care, you never could read maps.

I've driven this road many times myself, but in my point in history, the road is wider and paved. Lily Gap is where we lived when we moved out of my childhood home in Mokelumne Hill. Mom met a man up there, kind of like you, so up we went. Once, while my dad was driving my sisters and I to drop us off at this new house, he pointed out the window to a pond that appeared through the trees.

"This is Lily Gap," he announced as we passed. "Nanny and Grandpa Andy met here."

Calaveras County is full of ancestral Easter eggs like this for me. It was one of those things that peaked my interest for a moment, and then I logged it away in that brain file labeled another-family-history-thing. Not something I thought in depth about, but oddly did not forget. Funny how that snippet of a memory flashed out of that file as I read these first letters.

On my desk there is a black-and-white photo (a gift from Tracey). You're sitting on a log by a pond, your pale legs crossed daintily before you. A man sits beside you, tilting his head down next to yours as the two of you smile for the camera.

His name was Andrew Vivon Fischer; his friends called him Andy. They say opposites attract, and I don't think anybody could be more opposite of you than he was, Gen. He was as tall as you were short, subdued as you were outgoing, country boy as you were city girl. And he loved you from the moment he met you.

Perhaps as you got out of the car with Helen, laughing and joking as your blue eyes scanned the picnic goers, curious as to who you'd meet. Then, your heart skipped a beat as you locked eyes, blue on blue, with a tall, handsome stranger who couldn't seem to pull his blushing gaze away from you. Despite needing to shave, there was something that attracted you to his chiseled cheekbones, ruddy from working in the sun, blonde hair tousled after removing his hat. He wasn't dressed to the nines like the beaus down in San Fran, but his button-up shirt was tucked in and he managed to wear his clean pants. His worn cowboy boots peeked out every time he sat down, revealing his profession.

You flashed a charming grin, then asked Helen out the corner of your mouth, "Who's the cowboy?"

I don't know how mutual your feelings were at first. Maybe you felt the same. But honestly, you strike me as the kind of girl who liked being adored by several men at once. And here was yet another beau, a six-foot-two ruggedly handsome cowboy no less. Could any of those other chickens back in San Fran say they had one too?

Whatever your reason, when you returned to the big city, you pulled out pen and paper, and in youthful, swirling cursive you wrote Andy Fischer a letter. We do not, unfortunately, have this letter. I wish we did. We don't have many letters from you. However, we have hundreds of letters from Andy. Each letter he sent to you, you saved.

I don't know what compelled you to keep them. Maybe there was just something different about this country man. By the time the letters came to me, they were kept in two matching red boxes with tulips painted on the lids. They were not in order by date, and some had missing pages. Terry and I spent days, weeks, organizing them and gently slipping them into clear sheets, separated by year, the binders quickly growing fat. The letters are yellowed and delicate from being reread over and over through time. They are almost a hundred years old as I write this, and have outlived you both.

But in 1924, they were fresh and new, much like the love between you and Andy.