On My Mother's Side.

Sorting through more old family stuff. This letter doesn't have anything to do with what I'm writing, but I was stopped in my tracks by its liminality, by how it sits so precariously at a moment of great change, in my family and in American history.

These are two pages from a letter my grandmother, Elsie DeMeyer wrote to my mom in 1972, a little over a year after my grandfather, Emil DeMeyer had died. Less than a year later, my mother and Elsie (her mother) had a falling out that was never repaired. Since I was ten years old, I’ve thought of these events and told this story as if it was one quick sequence, and narratively it is, more or less, but this letter sits between the two events, after the death and before everything fell apart.

Not only was my mother’s family about to explode, but the quiet rural community of small family farms where she grew up was about to be gobbled up by a wave of development that started when Six Flags Great America came to town and started buying land to build an amusement park. Not a local phenomenon—though it certainly felt local to the folks in Gurnee, Illinois—but a seismic transformation of the American landscape and the end of a way of life for families, many (most?) of whom were descended from Northern Europeans who’d immigrated in the 19th century.

When I happened on this letter, I assumed it was written by my mother. the handwriting is eerily similar. I have letters in my grandfather Emil’s hand as well, and his cursive also looks almost the same. (Pages 1 and 2 of this letter are missing.)