The Five Sisters' Round Robin
going around since 1958

Hello, and welcome. My name is Diane Halvorson. I'm a bookkeeper for the school district in Fargo, North Dakota, and I'm the daughter of the youngest of five sisters who grew up on a farm in the northeast corner of the state, so close to the Canadian line that, as my mother likes to say, the wind came to them with a Canadian accent.

For forty-one years, my mother and her four sisters have kept one letter going. It isn't really one letter. It's a fat brown envelope that travels from sister to sister, all over the country, and when it comes to your house you take out the letter you wrote last time, read everybody else's, write a new one, put it in, and mail the whole thing on. They call it the Robin. Nobody remembers who named it.

This summer, when the Robin came through my mother's house in Moorhead, I asked all five of them if I could type it into the computer and put it here, so the grandchildren and great-grandchildren could read it, and so could anybody else who has ever kept a family together with stamps. Four said yes right away. Aunt Henrietta said yes if I promised to spell lefse right. I have.

Read this summer's packet: five letters, June and July 1999 >>

The Sisters

In order of age, which is also the order the Robin travels:

They were the Evenson girls. Their father farmed wheat and barley and kept a few cows, and they all milked before school, and they all left. That was what you did. But every one of them still says "home" and means that farm.

The Rules

Aunt Henrietta wrote the rules down in 1958 on an index card, and the card still travels in the packet, held together now with Scotch tape. Here they are, word for word except for my aunt's underlining, which I can't do on a computer:

Rule Number Three was meant to stop Aunt Barbara, who in 1958 had a typewriter and a box of carbon paper and thought she could write one letter and mail it to everybody separately. (She was voted down four to one.) It has lately become a question again, which you'll see in the packet.

Rule Number Six has never been used. Not once in forty-one years. My mother says that's the only reason the Robin is still alive: nobody wants to buy the stamps.

A Little History

1958. Their mother, my Grandma Evenson, died that April. After the funeral, the five of them sat at her kitchen table on the farm, the last time they were all in that kitchen together, and Aunt Henrietta said that if they didn't do something about it, they'd turn into the kind of sisters who only see each other at funerals. She mailed the first Robin from the post office in town the next week, with her own letter in it, and the rules.

1972. The Baby Robin. That year, by no planning whatsoever, all five sisters had a new grandbaby, and every letter in the packet came with a baby picture. My mother's was my son Anthony, at two weeks, looking furious. Aunt Lila took the pictures out of the packet and lined them all up on her kitchen counter and said they looked like a row of potatoes in bonnets. The Robin weighed so much that summer it took two stamps extra.

1983. The Lost Robin. Aunt Barbara had moved to Mesa, and her forwarding order ran out, and the packet disappeared for six weeks. There were phone calls. There were long-distance phone calls, which in this family is how you know it's serious. Aunt Henrietta wrote to the Postmaster General. It turned up at last in the Mesa post office, in a bin of mail for people who had moved, with a stamp on it that said something about an insufficient address. The letters were fine. My mother says she has never been so glad to see a brown envelope in her life, and she had three children's report cards come through her mailbox.

1997. The Flood Robin. The packet arrived at my mother's house the week the Red River came up, and while my husband and I were sandbagging her backyard, she carried it up to the attic with the photo albums and the good tablecloths. It stayed dry. So did most of the house, thank the Lord and the National Guard. She mailed it on, a day late, and Aunt Henrietta excused her under the sickness clause.

By my mother's count the Robin has been around more than two hundred times. It has carried news of eleven weddings, twenty-two grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren so far, two husbands lost, one hip, one knee, and one gallbladder. It has never once missed a birthday.

Read the Summer 1999 Packet >>

You are visitor number

since August 1999. At least half of you are cousins. Hello, cousins.

If you keep a round robin in your family, I would love to hear about it:
[email protected]

Last updated August 29, 1999