Every October for sixty years, my grandmother got a letter from her sister in the old country.
It always came in a thin blue-edged envelope with a stamp my grandmother would peel off carefully and keep. She never opened it right away. She’d set it on the kitchen table, put the kettle on, and wait until the tea had steeped the full four minutes, because she said you don’t read a letter from home with your hands still busy. Then she’d slide a butter knife under the flap, unfold the pages, and read them at the table with her glasses pushed up on her forehead, mouthing the words in Polish, one finger moving along the lines.
She opened every one. Sixty of them, sixty years running, without ever missing a year.
My grandmother died on a Sunday. We buried her the following Thursday, and on Monday, my mother and I went back to the little brick house to start sorting through a life. It’s a strange job, going through a closet someone has been careful with for fifty years. You keep feeling like you should knock first. In the hall closet, on the top shelf, we found a round hatbox, and inside the hatbox were the letters. Sixty of them, bundled by decade with kitchen string, the oldest soft as cloth, the newest still crisp. The bundles were labeled in my grandmother’s handwriting. 1966–1975. 1976–1985. They went on like that, neat as a ledger.
My mother held the hatbox in her lap, and she cried a little, and then she said she’d make us some tea.
That’s when we noticed the mail.
My grandmother’s neighbor had been gathering it since the day she died and stacking it on the counter, bills and flyers and a sympathy card. On the very top of the pile, sticking out sideways, was a thin blue-edged envelope.
I knew what it was before my mother did. I watched her pick it up. The postmark was from three weeks earlier, the handwriting that small, upright, slightly shaky cursive we’d seen on sixty envelopes. It was addressed to my grandmother. According to the neighbor’s note on the counter, it had arrived on Tuesday, two days after she died.
The sixty-first letter. It had been sitting on that counter for six days, and my grandmother had never seen it.
“We can’t open that,” I said.
“We can’t not,” my mother said. She sat down with it at the kitchen table, and put the kettle on, and waited four full minutes before she slid a butter knife under the flap.
She read it once. Then she read it again, with her hand pressed against her mouth.
Then she turned to me, white as the paper, and said:
“She’s coming here. Her sister’s coming. She lands on Thursday.”
Part 2
To understand why that sentence knocked the air out of my mother, you have to know about the cherry tree.
My grandmother’s name was Halina. She was born in a village in the hills of southern Poland, the younger of two sisters. Zofia was six years older, quiet and capable, the one who knew how to run a house. Halina was the restless one. When she was twenty, she accepted a proposal from a Polish-American man she’d met exactly twice, because it meant a ticket to America and a life she’d been reading about in magazines since she was twelve. His name was Walter, and he turned out to be kind, which was lucky for all of us.
The morning she left, in the spring of 1965, she walked out into the yard behind her mother’s house and planted a cherry sapling by the fence. She’d dug it up from the wood at the edge of the village herself. Zofia held the bucket of water.
“When it bears, I’ll come back,” Halina said. That’s what Zofia wrote in a letter, years later. That was the promise.
The tree bore in its third year.
My grandmother didn’t come. She wrote a letter instead, and she kept writing them, and a year went by, and then a decade.
There was a reason, or a hundred of them. Money. A visa that never arrived. A baby, then another baby. A border that was hard to cross in those years, and a country that made it hard to leave. By the time all of that eased, there was a husband with a bad heart, and a mortgage, and a fear of airplanes she’d never admitted to.
So she wrote. And her sister wrote back. Every October, an envelope came, and every October, my grandmother read it at the kitchen table with the tea going cold at her elbow.
I’ve read most of those letters now, in my mother’s translation. They’re not what you’d imagine. There are no grand declarations. They’re about the weather, the church roof, who died, whose daughter had a baby, which cow got sick. Zofia wrote the way you’d talk across a fence.
Every one of them ended with the same two lines.
The cherry tree bore forty-one pounds this year. I put up the jam.
And then: Do przyszłego roku, Halinko. Until next year.
Part 3
We read all sixty letters that week. I don’t know how else to say it. We sat at my grandmother’s kitchen table with the hatbox between us and the kettle going, and my mother translated aloud, and I listened, and we both cried at things that weren’t meant to be sad.
In 1971, there was a short letter, only half a page, in handwriting that wobbled. Their mother had died. Zofia had been with her. She’d laid her out herself, and washed her hair. We buried her next to Father, the letter said. I put your photograph in with her. Your hands on top, so she’d feel you were there.
My mother stopped reading for a while.
In 1989, the letter was longer and said, in the middle of a paragraph about the harvest, that the border was open now. Come home, Halinko. The tree is huge. Nobody will mind. Come see it.
That one had a tear in the corner where someone had gripped it too hard.
There were sixty-year-old photographs in the hatbox, small and square with scalloped borders. A girl in a headscarf holding a bucket by a fence. A young woman and an older one, arm in arm, squinting in the sun. A cherry tree in bloom, so white it looked overexposed. Under the letters, on the bottom of the box, was a folded piece of notepaper in my grandmother’s hand that I almost missed.
It was a list. Numbered, in pencil. The first items had been crossed out, one by one, over what looked like many years.
- Money. 2. Visa. 3. The baby. 4. Walter’s heart. 5. The airplane. 6. I’m too old now.
Below those, in different ink, the last lines. They weren’t crossed out.
- She’ll see what it cost me.
- She stayed. I left. I don’t know how to stand in that kitchen.
My mother read it three times. She set it carefully on the table, and put her palm over it, as if it might blow away.
“She was afraid of her,” my mother said. “Not of the plane. Of her sister’s kitchen. Of being forgiven, or of not being.”
I thought about sixty years of letters, each one ending until next year, and a woman at a table with a butter knife, reading the same promise and never once being able to go and keep it.
Then I looked at the date in the sixty-first letter, and I realized we had a more urgent problem.
Part 4
We had until Thursday.
My mother called the number at the bottom of the letter first. A young woman answered, in a mix of Polish and careful English. She was Zofia’s granddaughter, a nurse in the next town. My mother explained, in halting Polish, who she was. There was a long silence. Then the young woman said, quietly, that her grandmother had left for Warsaw the day before, with a suitcase and a cane, to catch the flight.
“She didn’t tell anyone she was going until the ticket was bought,” the granddaughter said. “She’s eighty-seven. She’s never been on an airplane. She told us she’d waited sixty years and she wasn’t going to wait for a better week. We tried to stop her. You can’t stop her.”
“Can you reach her?” my mother asked.
“She doesn’t carry a phone,” the girl said. “She says she’ll call when she’s there.”
My mother sat with that for a minute. I watched her do the arithmetic. The flight, the connection, the hours. We could leave messages with the airline. We could try the airport. We could, I suppose, have let her land and had someone tell her in an airport office, by a stranger, in broken Polish.
“No,” my mother said, setting down the phone. “No. She’s coming to see her sister. She isn’t going to hear it from a stranger. I’ll tell her myself.”
We drove to the airport on Thursday afternoon. I held the hatbox on my lap the whole way. My mother wore her good black dress, and her hands were shaking on the wheel, and she kept asking me how you say “I’m sorry” in Polish, the correct, respectful way, until I realized she’d known all along. She’d asked me to hear herself say it.
We stood at the arrivals gate for an hour and forty minutes. People poured through, hugging, laughing, pulling bags. I kept looking at the board. My mother stood perfectly straight, the way she does when she’s trying not to cry.
And then the doors slid open, and a very small, very old woman in a black wool coat and a headscarf came through them, leaning on a cane, with a woven basket on her arm. She was scanning every face. She was looking for somebody.
She saw my mother, and she stopped.
I will never forget that moment. I don’t know whether it was the nose or the eyes or the way my mother was standing. But Zofia looked at my mother’s face, and I watched her know, all at once, in the middle of an airport, in front of two hundred strangers, before anyone said a word.
“Kiedy?” she said.
My mother didn’t need me to translate. When.
Part 5
“Sunday,” my mother said, and her voice cracked in half. “Last Sunday. I’m so sorry. Ciociu, I’m so sorry. She never saw the letter.”
For a moment, the old woman stood perfectly still. Then she lowered the basket carefully to the floor, and she held out her arms, and my mother went into them.
I stood there with the hatbox, watching two women who’d never met hold each other in the middle of an airport. People moved around them. A man pulled his suitcase past, and glanced, and kept walking.
“I wrote it three weeks before I left,” Zofia said, when she could speak. She said it in Polish, and my mother translated through her tears, quietly, a half-sentence behind. “I wrote that I was coming. Then I counted the days, and I thought, it will reach her in good time. She’ll read it with her tea, she’ll have days to think.”
“It came two days after she died,” my mother said. “She was already gone.”
“Then I’m sixty-one letters late,” Zofia said.
She stayed through the winter. Nobody questioned it. My mother cleared out the sewing room, and the old woman moved in with her woven basket and her cane and a framed photograph of a cherry tree she’d brought wrapped in a towel.
On the first morning, we took her to the cemetery. It was cold and bright, the grass white with frost. She stood in front of the headstone for a long time with her hand on top of it, the way you’d hold the shoulder of someone who’d fallen asleep in a chair. Then she knelt, slowly, one knee at a time, and opened the basket.
Inside, under a cloth, was a jar of cherry jam with a handwritten label. And beneath that, wrapped in damp newspaper and tied with string, was a small cutting. A branch, maybe a foot long, with a few swollen buds.
“From the tree,” she said. “Halinka’s tree. I took it the morning I left. I was going to bring her a piece of it, so she could plant it here, and see it.”
She looked at my mother.
“I never wrote to make her feel guilty,” she said. “I wrote so she’d know it kept its promise. When it bears, I’ll come back. It bore every single year. I counted. I thought, if she can’t come to the tree, I’ll bring her the tree’s news. That was all I could do.”
My mother was crying again. So was I.
We planted the cutting that afternoon, at the head of the grave, in a hole we dug with a borrowed shovel. Zofia knelt beside it with her hands in the cold dirt. She patted it down and said something in Polish, very softly, that my mother didn’t translate.
Later, in the car, I asked.
“She said,” my mother said, wiping her eyes, “‘There. Now you’re home.'”
I keep the sixty-first letter in the hatbox, on top of the others, unfolded. My grandmother never read it, and she never had to. She spent sixty years waiting for it. And in the end, her sister did come. She just came to the right house.
