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Dear Laura, Love Pearl Pearl Womack, 1915 – 1999 sixty-two years of Sunday letters Two Girls • The Letters • From Pearl • The Last One • Our Nine Visits My name is Laura Sessoms. I am 84 years old, and I live in Savannah, Georgia, where I played the organ at my church for forty-one years until my feet gave out before my hands did. I am typing this myself, in large print so that I can see it, with my great-granddaughter Miranda, who is fourteen, sitting beside me to tell me which button to push. She says I am doing very well. She is a kind child and a poor liar. This page is about my friend Pearl Womack, who died in January. We met on the first day of the first grade, in September of 1921, and we were best friends for seventy-seven years. For sixty-two of those years she lived in California and I lived in Georgia, and we wrote to each other every single week. Not most weeks. Every week. I have been told that nobody writes letters anymore, that it is all electronic mail now. I find it a little funny, then, that I should be telling you about our letters on a computer. Pearl would have found it very funny indeed. Two Girls Mossy Branch, Georgia, was a town of about six hundred people, a depot, two churches and a school, and it still is, more or less. In 1921 the first grade and the second grade shared a room, and Miss Lassiter put the new girls two to a desk. She put me with a skinny, freckled girl in a dress made out of a flour sack who leaned over before the bell had even rung and told me that her name was Pearl and that she could spit farther than either of her brothers. I was a minister's daughter. I had never heard anything so thrilling in my life. That was the arrangement for the next twelve years. Pearl got us into things and I got us out of them. She climbed the water tower and I stood at the bottom praying. She talked back to the teachers and I wrote the apologies. I took piano lessons from the age of seven and Pearl came along to every one and sat on the porch, because she had no ear for music whatever and said so, but she liked the walk. When I played my first hymn in church at twelve, Pearl was in the front pew making faces to steady my nerves. It worked. We graduated together in May of 1933, in the deepest part of the Depression, two of fourteen in our class. I went to Savannah to study music and play for a church. Pearl married Howard Womack in 1935, a tall, cheerful boy from the next county who could fix anything with a motor in it, and I married Fred Sessoms in June of 1936 with Pearl as my matron of honor, crying so hard she had to be handed two handkerchiefs. In the spring of 1937 Howard heard there was work in California building airplanes, and they packed what they owned into a secondhand Ford and drove west. I went to Mossy Branch to see them off. Pearl hugged me in the road and said, "I'll write you Sunday." And she did. The Letters Here is how it went, for sixty-two years. Every Sunday night, I wrote to Pearl. I wrote after the evening service, at the kitchen table, on the same sort of blue paper I have bought for sixty years. Every Sunday night, Pearl wrote to me, after supper, three hours behind me in California. Our letters passed each other somewhere over Texas. That meant we were always answering the letter before last, and never quite caught up, and we liked it that way. It meant there was always something left to say. We wrote about everything. Babies and recipes and husbands and the price of coffee. Who in Mossy Branch had married whom and who should not have. What the preacher said. What we were reading. What we were afraid of. In sixty-two years I do not believe either of us ever wrote anything we had to take back. Long distance was dear when we were young, and so we hardly ever telephoned. Later on we could afford to, and we still didn't, except at Christmas and on our birthdays. Pearl said a telephone call goes in one ear and out the other, and a letter goes in a hatbox. I have counted. Sixty-two years at fifty-two Sundays a year comes to something over three thousand two hundred letters, each way. I put a stamp on every one of mine, and I have bought every first-class stamp the post office ever sold from three cents to thirty-three. When Pearl sent me a letter with two two-cent stamps on it in 1958, the week the rate went up to four cents, I knew she had been to the post office in her bathrobe. The hatboxes. Pearl's letters are in my bedroom closet in fourteen hatboxes, round ones, with the years written on the lids in my hand. The early boxes are from hats I actually wore, to church, in the days when a woman wore a hat to church. After about 1965 I had to go to the department store and ask if they had any empty ones. Miranda took them all down for me in February and lined them up on the bed, and we sat there together for a long time. She asked if she could read some. I said she could read any she liked, and that she would find out a great many things about her great-grandmother that she had not been told. She has been reading them ever since. From Pearl Here are a few pieces of Pearl's letters, one or two from each part of our lives. I could have chosen a thousand. These are her words, not mine. She was always the better writer of the two of us, though she would never admit it.
The Last One Pearl's eyes had been failing for a few years, and her last letters were written in big round print, a few lines to a page, so that she could read them back. Her last one was dated Sunday, January 10, 1999. It was four pages long and said that it had rained, that Maryann had brought her a pot roast, and that she was tired, and it ended the way they all did. It is on top of the fourteenth hatbox. On Sunday, January 17, I wrote to her as usual. It was the first letter I put a thirty-three cent stamp on, the rate having just gone up again. I mailed it Monday morning. Pearl died in the hospital on Wednesday, January 20, 1999, of pneumonia, after a short illness. She was 83. Maryann telephoned me Thursday morning. She said her mother had asked for her glasses on Tuesday so she could write to Laura, and they had not been able to find them. My letter came back to me in February, with a little hand stamped on the front, pointing back at my own address. I have not opened it. I don't need to. I know what it says. It says what all of them said, for sixty-two years: what the preacher preached about, and what the weather was, and that I hoped she was well, and that I would write again Sunday. I have kept on writing to her on Sunday nights. I don't mail them. I have told Miranda that is not as peculiar as it sounds, and she said, Grandma Laura, it's not peculiar at all. I told you she was a kind child. In sixty-two years we were in the same room nine times. Here is each one. And if you would like to write to me, I would be very glad of it: [email protected]     kind visitors since April Last updated Sunday, September 12, 1999, after the evening service |