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Our Nine Visits 1937 – 1999 << Back to Dear Laura, Love Pearl Three thousand letters and nine visits. People have asked me whether that wasn't hard, and the honest answer is that it was, and that it wasn't. When you write to somebody every week, you are never really very far away from them. But I won't pretend I didn't count the years between. 1. April 1941 · Burbank Four years after she left, I took the train to California by myself. Fred saw me off at the depot in Savannah with a shoebox of fried chicken. It took the better part of four days, by way of New Orleans and across Texas, and I sat up in a coach seat the whole way and didn't mind. Pearl met me at the station in Los Angeles with Warren, who was three, on her hip, and we both started crying before the train had stopped. She had a little rented house with an orange tree in the yard, and I ate an orange right off the tree, which I had never done in my life. She took me to see the Pacific Ocean, which looked to me exactly like the Atlantic, only facing the wrong way, and to see the big sign up on the hill, which still said HOLLYWOODLAND in those days. 2. June 1948 · Mossy Branch Pearl came home for her mother's funeral. Her mother had taught half the town in Sunday school, me included, and the church could not hold everybody who came. Pearl brought Warren, who was ten, and Maryann, who was two and into everything. After the funeral we had a week. We spent most of it on her mother's front porch in the evenings, in the same swing we had sat in as girls, not saying much. We didn't need to. We'd said it all in the letters. 3. August 1956 · Anaheim My first airplane, with three stops between Savannah and Los Angeles and my daughter Sonja, who was nine, beside me with her nose against the window from one end of the country to the other. I brought Pearl a blue china cup from a shop downtown because her letters said she was down to mismatched ones. Then Pearl and I took both girls to Mr. Disney's park, which had been open just a year. Pearl rode a teacup that went around in circles and came off green and laughing. I declined. Sonja and Maryann still talk about that day, and they are both grandmothers now. 4. June 1961 · Savannah For our twenty-fifth anniversary, Fred bought Pearl a train ticket to Savannah as a surprise for me. I came home from choir practice and there she was on my front porch with her suitcase, as though she had walked over from next door. It was the first time she had ever seen my city. We walked every one of the squares, under the live oaks, and she said she understood at last why I never wanted to leave. She sat in the front pew at church that Sunday and made faces at me during the prelude, exactly as she had when we were twelve. I missed a note. The first in years. 5. July 1969 · Van Nuys I flew out to stay with Pearl and Howard at their house in the Valley, and happened to be there for the Moon. On Sunday evening, July 20, we sat side by side on her sofa and watched the man step down onto it, and neither of us said a word for a good while. Then Pearl said, well, it's Sunday night. So we sat down at her kitchen table across from one another and each wrote the other a letter, and handed them across the table, and read them, and laughed until we cried. I have that letter. It is in the 1969 hatbox, and it begins, "Dear Laura, You are sitting right in front of me and you have jelly on your chin." 6. March 1979 · Van Nuys Howard died of a heart attack in his garage, with a lawn mower in pieces in front of him, which Pearl said was exactly how he would have chosen. I flew out the next day. I don't remember much about that week, except that I sat beside her at the funeral and held her hand, and that in the evenings she kept starting to say something to him and stopping, and that I washed every dish in her house twice because I could not think what else to do. 7. May 1985 · Savannah Fred died in March of 1985, of cancer, after a long illness that he bore better than I did. Pearl came in May, as she had promised, and stayed five weeks. She cooked and I let her. She made me walk every morning, around Forsyth Park, and she made me go back to the organ bench on the first Sunday in June, and she sat in the front pew. She did not make faces that time. She just nodded, once, when I started. It was enough. 8. March 1990 · Savannah The happiest visit. We were both seventy-five and we had decided that this was the time to have some fun. Pearl came for St. Patrick's Day, which is a very large occasion in Savannah, and she dressed in green from her hat to her shoes, although there was not one drop of Irish in her. We sat on folding chairs on the parade route with a thermos of coffee and stayed until the very last bagpiper, and a young man in a kilt kissed Pearl on the cheek, and she talked about it in her letters for a year. 9. October 1996 · Van Nuys The last time. I was eighty-one, and my granddaughter, Miranda's mother, flew out with me so that I would not get lost in any airports. Pearl was using a cane by then and so was I, and we made a great joke of it. We spent most of the week in two lawn chairs under her lemon tree, reading old letters aloud to each other from a box she had brought out. Some of them we had both forgotten. Some of them neither of us would ever forget. At the airport on the last morning she held on to my hands and said, "I'll write you Sunday," the very same words she said in the road in 1937. And she did, every Sunday, until January. << Back to Dear Laura, Love Pearl Laura Sessoms, Savannah, Georgia · [email protected] Last updated Sunday, September 12, 1999