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Where I have been living since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no mailman, but I still check the letterbox in the front door every day. To send or receive a letter, I drive about a mile to a shop on the carraterra between here and the lovely little village which has begun to return to a kind of normal after 18 months of on-again-off-again lockdowns, mask mandates, social distancing protocols, new vaccines, new variants, and head-turning debate about all of these. It’s not officially over. The virus itself will always be around, and even as variants wreak havoc in many places, in others it appears to be “socially over,” people exhausted and drained as they resume a kind of normalcy, no longer fearing- or no longer caring about – the virus which has upended life as we knew it, keeping us apart yet also bringing us together.
The United States Postal Service reported that in 2020, letter writing increased, perhaps gaining more interest because unlike digital and disposable exchanges, letters take a little more work, a little more intention. After all, you have to find a pen, write the letter, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and send it. You have to slow down – even as the world around you spins at breakneck speed.
In the study, 61% of respondents found that “mail is extra special during this time of social distancing” and 54% of respondents found that communication via snail mail fostered a “more meaningful connection to those they sent mail to.”
United States Postal Service
Stashed in a dresser drawer in a room that might one day become a writing room, are some scenic postcards, bought in a gift shop in nearby Chapala at the height of the pandemic. I still plan to send them all, these ‘wish-you-were-heres’ to the people I love best – my own ones – hopeful that the letter writer I used to be will return and take advantage of the hours now available to shape various tidings with the very best words I can find – there is only so much room on a post card, even less than on that red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail – par avion.
When I hand my letter to the smiling girl behind the counter, I do so only half-believing it will reach its intended destination. One package that was mailed to me from Arizona disappeared after spending three months in Mexico city, another arrived but was held hostage at the airport by a customs official for several days before I begged him to just send it back to Phoenix because it had my favorite red coat inside. He did.
On the other hand, the postcards I have mailed to Phoenix and Derry and Limerick and Belfast have all been received. It gladdens me to think of my mother, isolated for all those months with my dad in their Castledawson home turning over a postcard from an impossibly far away Tlaquepaque to see my familiar handwriting for the first time in years.
It was because of the late Eavan Boland that I began sending those picture postcards. Like Seamus Heaney, whose words have scored so much of my life, she had that way of knowing the things that matter most to people, those routines and rituals that shape the ways in which we present ourselves to the world. She knew how to make personal the political and the public. She was, as President Michael D. Higgins said of her “one of the most insightful inner sources of Irish life, not only in life as expressed but as sensed and experienced.” She knew the value of a hand-written letter.
THE LOST ART OF LETTER WRITING
Eavan Boland
The ratio of daylight to handwriting
Was the same as lacemaking to eyesight.
The paper was so thin it skinned air.
The hand was fire and the page tinder.
Everything burned away except the one
Place they singled out between fingers
Held over a letter pad they set aside
For the long evenings of their leave-takings,
Always asking after what they kept losing,
Always performing—even when a shadow
Fell across the page and they knew the answer
Was not forthcoming—the same action:
First the leaning down, the pen becoming
A staff to walk fields with as they vanished
Underfoot into memory. Then the letting up,
The lighter stroke, which brought back
Cranesbill and thistle, a bicycle wheel
Rusting: an iron circle hurting the grass
Again and the hedges veiled in hawthorn
Again just in time for the May Novenas
Recited in sweet air on a road leading
To another road, then another one, widening
To a motorway with four lanes, ending in
A new town on the edge of a city
They will never see. And if we say
An art is lost when it no longer knows
How to teach a sorrow to speak, come, see
The way we lost it: stacking letters in the attic,
Going downstairs so as not to listen to
The fields stirring at night as they became
Memory and in the morning as they became
Ink; what we did so as not to hear them
Whispering the only question they knew
By heart, the only one they learned from all
Those epistles of air and unreachable distance,
How to ask: is it still there?
The morning that Eavan Boland died I had mailed two of those postcards to Ireland before I heard the news. She had been teaching at Stanford University in California, only returning to the old country a month prior to be close to her family in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant stay-at-home orders.
As I absorbed the news of her death, my mind wandered to her poem, “Quarantine,” in which she uses just twenty spare lines to tell the story of an unnamed husband and wife during the Irish Famine, that catastrophic period once described by former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, as the event ‘which more than any other shaped us as a people. It defined our will to survive. It defined our sense of human vulnerability.“
Honoring the dead couple in the poem, Boland honors forever over a million people, many of them nameless, who lost their lives to starvation and disease.
Sitting in my house, far from home, reading online daily updates of COVID-19 and its ravages all over the world, I am reminded of this, and of why, in Boland’s own words, she wrote Quarantine, the poem that would eventually be one of ten shortlisted for RTÉ’s selection of Ireland’s favorite poems of the last 100 years in 2015
to bring together so much of the public agony and private experience of the Ireland of that time. Just a terrible parable of people on the dark side of history, who somehow amend it for a moment by the grace of their actions.
Amazing grace.
Quarantine
Eavan Boland – 1944-2020
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
