Love Letters

My heart settled heavily on the harsh reality of what had become of my grandparents’ home. Grandma was gone—all ninety years of her. Even the air carried the weight of it—smelling faintly of used cat litter and the musk of old age—a scent that lingered like a memory. As my mom and I combed through the closets and dresser drawers in their bedroom, my insides tightened. The house felt so still. So full of her absence.

I tried to keep my usual bright smile for Grandpa—the one that had earned me the nickname “Bubbles”—but it felt forced now. The longer Mom and I sifted through Grandma’s things, the more everything became mechanical. It was as if grief had unhooked our hearts from the task, leaving only our hands to finish what had to be done. We were the ones Grandpa had chosen to see it through.

As we worked, Grandpa kept rising and sitting back down again in the curved wicker chair next to the bed. Each time, he fidgeted with the coins in his pockets, paced a few steps, then offered some small, hollow instruction—his way of staying busy while his heart quietly broke.

Mom and I folded each item with care and packed them into cardboard boxes I’d gathered from our family’s supermarket, which Grandma and Grandpa had founded together with nothing more than a bit of savings and a monumental dream. She’d believed in him so completely that she’d agreed to gamble everything they had to see his vision through. What began as a single store blossomed into a thriving company, but she never sought the credit. To her, the success was his. Their love was the real reward. Each fold felt like closing the cover on a chapter I wasn’t ready to finish. The thought that nearly a century of her extraordinary life, and the extraordinary love she shared with Grandpa, could fit into a few dozen boxes felt impossible. And unbearably sad.

At Grandpa’s request, we labeled everything: item, count, and estimated value, all scrawled on a yellow legal pad with a capless black pen. The clothing would go to the disaster relief fund, auctioned off at a fraction of its worth, and the proceeds given to those who needed them most.

To me, though, these weren’t just clothes from department stores. They were memories. They held laughter, holidays, Sunday mornings, and moments no auction could ever measure. I remembered Grandma wearing some of them: the green-and-red Christmas vest with gold buttons she wore one Christmas Eve at my cousin Stacy’s; the cream polyester pants she wore to lunch with me the Thursday before she passed; the cat socks she loved so much, their fabric worn thin from years of use; and her jewelry.

All of her jewelry was willed to my mom. I marveled at the pieces—some genuine, some costume—but all of them magnificent in their own way. There was enough to fill a thirty-six-gallon box—and we did.

At the bottom of one drawer, tucked beneath satin and wooden jewelry cases, tangled necklaces, and tarnished pillboxes, we found them—quiet, untouched for more than fifty years.

Love letters.

There were more than a dozen of them, tied with a faded royal-blue ribbon, just like something from an old black-and-white film. But this was real.

Mom reached for them, her face mirroring my awe. Then she passed them to me, and I cradled them like something sacred. The envelopes were soft and yellowed, their pencil-written addresses still legible in my grandfather’s rough, looping script. Each bore a worn one-, two-, or three-cent stamp and a circular postmark: 1948. He had written them while courting my grandmother, just months before they were married and expecting their first child—my mom.

The ache in my chest lifted. My eyes drifted to the wedding photo hanging beside the dresser: my grandfather holding her close, their young faces radiant with joy. Then I looked to the newer photo hanging opposite it—lines of age tracing their faces, gray hair overtaking the black and blond—but their eyes, their smiles, were unchanged.

I began to cry. Not from sadness, but from gratitude—for their love, for the proof of it in my hands, for the knowledge that two people could build a life so steadfast and real that no passage of time could erode it.

Their love wasn’t a fairytale—no dragons, no knights, no castles in the sky. Just devotion. Quiet, enduring, human devotion. The kind that, if two people are lucky enough to find and keep, makes them the luckiest souls on earth.

In that moment, I understood something I hadn’t before: love doesn’t need grand gestures to endure. It just needs to be kept, like these letters, steady and safe.

When I handed the letters to my grandpa, tears filled his warm brown eyes. He took them gently, smiled through his grief, and said, his voice trembling, “I’m going to read all of these…and I’ll cherish every word.”

The house was still quiet, but it didn’t feel empty anymore. Love had left its mark in ink and paper, in memories folded carefully into boxes, waiting to be held again.

© 2007 Lowvee Cole. All rights reserved.

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