Bernadette and I exchanged letters for more than sixty years, back when a first-class stamp cost six cents. When I was in St. Louis or Los Angeles and she was in New York, when I was in New York and she was in New Hampshire or the Berkshires, wherever we were we corresponded. We exchanged trash book recommendations, gossip, job complaints, updates on her children, thank you’s, poems in progress, recipes, plans and reminiscences. There was always more to say, recording dailyness.

For the last several years, her letters usually came in large, square-ish, almost neon-yellow envelopes, often decorated with stickers—dinosaurs, butterflies, bats, basketballs, meerkats. They sometimes contained dried flowers, seeds, menus, poems, photographs or newspaper clippings. One arrived with a “Postage due: 49 cents” notice, but it was delivered anyway. Those envelopes were easy to spot in my mail, and I saved them to open last.

On a visit to Buffalo in 2011, she wrote that the chef baked her name into the cornbread.

From Pensacola in 2004, she told about dreams and turducken, along with a recipe for vegetable broth. The stamp cost 37 cents, and featured a reticulate collared lizard.

In 1992, pre-stroke and still handwritten, Max seemed to have an earring stuck in his earlobe.

There’s a birthday letter: I like Peggy better than creamed spinach…I like Peggy better than sky blue pink skirts.

She watches her neighbor bale hay, and Douglas Rothschild helps Phil paint the roof.

I wish she had included more details when she wrote, “For my trash book, I’m reading the story of a Colombian woman ‘brought up’ by monkeys.”

Two subjects recur, especially after Bernadette and Phil moved to the country. She recorded weather—often with disfavor at its extremes, the skyscape and the current leaves and flowers and incipient blossomings. (Incipient was a favorite word, I noticed as I reread.). The other dominant topic was food. What else to expect from a Scrabble player who felt all food words earned double points? Oysters, raspberries, asparagus, potatoes, soups and pies…

When we were in the same city, we spent a lot of time on the phone, often in the middle of the night. Those calls were immediate, and important to us, but the letters seem to offer freedom to wander, and to speculate. More wordplay, more space, more flirting with language.

I have no idea what I ever wrote back, but it doesn’t much matter. The letters exchanged news and ideas, but mostly they were a way of saying I’m thinking about you.

It’s cool and cloudy tonight, and there’s an amaryllis flowering on the table, next to a bowl of clementines.