Dear children, after some delay I take my pen in hand in answer to your most welcome letter which I received and should have bin answered sooner but there is much of my time that it is almost all I can do to attend to my every day affairs so I hope you will excuse me for my failure.
She began each of her letters similar to this, “I take my pen in hand…” I don’t have actual letters, but I have copies of what my great-great grandmother in Georgia wrote to her daughter and family in Indian Territory in the late 1800s.
I’ve wondered a lot about her, Lydia, a widow living on a small farm and managing animals and work all by herself. She wrote about the hard times she had, her hopes that the corn crop would be good, her plan to kill one of her hogs for meat during the winter. She worked hard, she had grit and determination, and I imagine she had little time to write. But, somehow, she found time because she loved that far-flung family that, as far as I know, she never saw again after they left Georgia.
I have a picture that she drew and painted for my grandmother, her granddaughter. It is on plain notebook paper and is much the worse for wear, being creased and folded into an envelope more than a hundred years ago. It’s an intricate picture which would have taken more than one night to complete, sitting at her kitchen table with a kerosene lamp for light. She used only two or three colors, I imagine of ink of some sort–maybe she made the paint herself.
Her daytime hours must have been filled with work and a determination to make a living from the farm. But, at night, did her dreams soar and her love of beauty surface? As she sat in the lamplight and thought of her family so far away, thought of the beautiful things she’d liked to have had, she wrote or she drew. She must have been a lovely woman.
Lovely!
Thank you, Kimberly.