beautiful. improbable. strange.

Home for the summer from the University of Michigan in 1930, my grandmother recorded her first date with "Mr. Smith, teacher at Whittier here OSU grad."

A Buckeye!

She married him anyway.

On one visit, probably when I was in high school, Grandma invited me into her bedroom to show me some treasures. She was organizing, getting rid of some items, a few dresses, a pair of “tennies” from the 1930’s or 40’s, probably Converse or a knock-off, black. They were on her bed, and I remember how surprised I was, how heavy they seemed when I picked them up.

She opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of letters in a plastic bag. “These are my love letters. I don’t want anyone to get their grubby hands on ‘em, so when I’m gone. Promise me you’ll take them.” I promised.

We sat side-by-side on the bedspread she'd embroidered, and she let me look through the envelopes at the stamps and dates. There was one loose card, no envelope, and I flipped it open. She nipped it out of my hands before I could get much past something along the lines of, “Forgive me, dearest. I shouldn’t have let things go so far last night. I’m sorry I got carried away….” I suspect heavy petting. (That card had disappeared from the pile by the time I collected them after her death.) She was not shy about how much she loved that man, and I believe she was truthful about waiting until they were married to do the deed. “There was never another man before Horace, and I didn’t want another man after he died!”

My grandmother was a storyteller, and I was a receptive audience. Decades after her death I am still intimately familiar with the narratives she constructed. Even now I can hear the sound of her voice in my mind's ear. So I was already familiar with the story of young Audra falling in love.

After she died, it was ten years before I felt brave enough to look at the letters. Now, I don't know what I expected, but it never occurred to me that they might be boring. I opened one and was confronted with a vapid, unkind, sexually frustrated twenty-year-old—a perfectly ordinary and not terrifically interesting young woman.

Another ten years later, I decided to take another look—not just at one, but at the whole collection, all sixty-five letters.

Just sorting the letters into chronological order was tedious and felt interminable. (I have a new appreciation for historians.) I was only about five letters in, from May of 1931, when I learned [dun... dun... DUN...!] that Audra and Horace were secretly engaged for years before they told her mother.

The letters were written in May of 1931 and January to June of 1932, her senior year at Michigan. The interesting bits were few and far between, and I needed a way to find those good bits later, but in context. So I read them aloud into a document as fast as I possibly could, which occasionally had me laughing aloud in my quiet, empty house. Because it sounds like this:

your letter was so very nice comma honey comma and I did like it so much period gee comma it's wonderful to get letters from you every day comma do you know it comma darling question mark they're always so very nice and mean so very much to me comma honey period I don't know what I should ever do without them comma dearest period do you know it comma honey question mark

(Try reading that in your head at top speed. I dare you.)

I was nearly halfway through the stack before I found a paragraph that was catty and, for a blessed, refreshing change, authentic:

No my 'precious sorority sisters' weren't shocked any when I wore my woolen stockings to class the other day. You see, they don't become shocked at me anymore, but only disgusted. They're so used to me doing the unconventional and wrong thing that I'm really the 'black sheep' of the bunch. I'm about as well liked here as the flu. They never consult me for any advice or the like but only when they want some dirty work done. I'm getting so I hate them all, as they're just a bunch of prudish snobs. Oh well, enough of this, 3 months from now and it'll be all over but the shouting. Dear, I graduate 3 months from Sunday, isn't that grand? I think so, because it should end our separation forever, if only I can land a job in Lorain.

This is one of only a very few moments in the letters where I could actually recognize the unconventional math major I knew fifty years later.

So many themes are familiar:

Dear, I am worried about teaching in Lorain next year. Mother sent me a clipping from the paper saying that they probably wouldn't hire any new teachers next year. That sounds bad and I don't know what to do. I wonder where it will all end. Gee, something better happen soon. Well, we can talk prospects over when I come home. No use spoiling my last few days of college, eh what?

And then there are also a few unpleasantly familiar scenes of the reasonably-affluent-white-sorority-girl sort. Ugh. Although, to her credit, after she describes pitching a huge fit—and here I learned the word "piker"—essentially ending a long friendship, she has the humility to ask, "Am I in the wrong here? Dear, you know I count on you to tell me if I am."

This week I finished the transcription, all the letters. It tickled me to be able to compile the data, see the themes. For instance, only twice did she address him by name, Horace. Unsurprisingly. She told me many times, "I wouldn't call a DOG Horace! Why would you do that to a child?" Evidently she decided moments after meeting him that she'd call him Smitty.

Here we are. Young love by the numbers:

48,471 words
95 pages, single spaced
160 dearests
281 darlings
151 sweethearts
27 adorables usually followed by boy

And then a poignant end:

Well, honey, tomorrow (meaning Monday to you when you read this) I'll be home. If I come early I'll call you, and if not you call me about 8:30. Then we'll have a date on Tuesday evening and I'll get all the much-desired kisses I want so badly. Have a good supply on hand, honey. But I know you will, cause you've never failed me yet. I've loads of things to talk to you about dear, and how much I do love you. And I want to hear you tell me how much you love me. There're so many happy times ahead of us I know, dearest.

It's a strange exercise to dig into a small, intimate chapter of a young person's life, this particular moment, which a friend described in an email this way, "I love seeing young couples enter the theater of domestic bliss. It is such a fragile combination hopes, drives, goodwill, and anxiety that makes the nesting sequence possible. It's a beautiful, improbable thing."

It is. Beautiful, improbable, strange. But especially poignant when you already know the ending, and the hardship and tragedies that will unfold.