In late 2013, when I was a full-time Woman’s Day employee stepping into the office as one did on a daily basis there would be times that the letters people sent to the magazine looking for various dates on when articles ran or other such things landed on my desk. One day I opened an envelope with a blue recipe card inside, fragile with age and printed in that lovely neat&tiny script of a certain generation. It told of how to make Dutch Coffee Cake circa 1940-something and naturally a good bit of lard was called for according to the ingredients list. (We had a backpage that updated, or rather modernized, recipes from the way-back time, so I think that was why it arrived.)

I became instantly besotted with the writer of the included letter. Something about the language she used describing how this was her husband’s favorite cake after he came back from WWII as they were making a life for themselves as a newly married couple in Binghamton, NY. It was chatty, funny, matter-of-fact, with some little mysteries between the lines about her leaving high school to work in a defense plant during the war. Her name was Winnie Swingle and she currently lived in Lula, Georgia. I mean, that was poetry too. I wrote her back. She wrote me back telling me more. And so began an awesome exchange of letters, books, random trinkets, and, most importantly, thoughts on living, dying, and some everyday incidents in NYC and Lula.

She was a lady who liked to sketch and also had a few pooches (cuz she lived in Lula, Georgia, and had a lot of room for them to run around in a yard). Bit by bit, she introduced me to her brood through the pen&pencil drawings she made on napkins, scraps of paper, and other flat surfaces. I told her about my dad and his collages. Because he and she were the same age, their lived childhood experiences chimed, but as gender would have it, diverged in young adulthood. While they were both grown and formed during the Depression, my dad moved to California from Illinois for college and then a graphic design career, while Winnie stayed close to home in upstate New York and married a returning GI, made him many loaves of Dutch Coffee Cake, and had kids. Then in 1967, when she was 44, she enrolled in an art program at Binghamton University, SUNY, graduating in 1975. Somewhere along the way, her husband died and some time after that she moved to Lula, Georgia.

These details of her came little by little as I’d tell of the job, my college life, and past career. I’d pack up every book on dogs that landed on the giveaway table along with other tchotchkes (she enjoyed perfume), she sent me sketches and every updated year of Lula refrigerator magnet and calendar. I’ve still got it all tucked in a fireproof box sitting on top of the other fireproof box that holds all my dad’s mementos and important papers.

The magical thing about my relationship with Winnie was that we were intimate in a way you can be with someone you’ve never met. I think that’s a thing. One time she sent me a photo with “this is me” written on it in ballpoint pen. The snapshot was of a very messy room, like maybe where she stored ornaments, lawn elves, and all the bits of life that it’s sometimes hard to get rid of. And although I did spend a good long time looking up-close at the picture to see if I could find a human in there, there wasn’t one, so took it more as a message about who she was on the inside.

She would also send letters on all kinds of things, which honestly is one of my favorite things. She chalked it up to being a Depression-era holdover in that you use everything rather than buying something new. If only we’d stuck to that kind of no-waste living. We may not be having quite so many landfill-begets-climate crisis-begets-look outside wherever you live and see the destruction-moments. In early 2018, two things happened with Winnie. One: She let me know her hands were hurting so she wouldn’t be able to write as much as she had but she’d still find a way to send mementos of herself and her life. I had found a tape recorder I wasn’t using and so sent it to her with some blank tapes. Maybe she used it although I never received any spoken moments back. She also mentioned that she would be in Binghamton and that I should come up to see her. I never did do that. In some fundamental way I felt as if a spell might be broken between us. It was a strange sense that this woman who I didn’t know bupkis about physically, who only existed as her written self would become three-dimensional. In a way I can’t fully explain, I didn’t want to know her beyond the page. When I finally did see her, it was on the memorial notice her daughter sent me in 2018.

I think about this topic of spells or boundaries or stepping into somewhere that may burst the magic bubble now because the night my dad died, as Dennis and I sat by the bed, I’d been completely engaged in holding his hand, kissing his head, talking to him for the first many many hours, but during the last hour as his breathing slowed and I knew he was passing, I didn’t take his hand or even say a word to him. Some kind of sense that I didn’t want to distract him from the very real work he was doing…even if it seemed peaceful in some ways, it also appeared not totally without effort…and a part of me felt a bit in awe of it and shy of interrupting.

And sometimes I think we make things up. But yet. I can feel guilt over those moments: not taking his hand, not meeting Winnie. I can acknowledge that. Not get stuck in it but just look. I can also know how much Winnie’s letters mean to me, what I learned from her, and how happy I know she was with my deliveries as well.

And with my dad, there isn’t a need for any words around what every minute of every hour spent with him meant. He knew it. I knew it. Here we are with them.