Inside that metal box were hundreds of folded letters, each one bundled with twine and marked with a year. At first I thought they might be old bills or farm records. Then I unfolded the top one. The first line said, “Martha, I talked to you again today.” My stomach dropped. The date was six years after Martha had died. I sat there on the cabin floor with ash on my jeans and read the entire letter without moving.
There must have been forty years’ worth of them. The farmer had written to his wife every week after she passed away. Not because he couldn’t let go, but because it was how he stayed connected to her. He told her about the calves being born, the weather, the neighbors, and which tomatoes finally came up in the garden. He wrote about their children, then later about their grandchildren. Some letters were only a page. Others were ten. One of them simply said, “The first snow came today. I still look over to tell you.” That one got me.
I couldn’t stop thinking about those letters, especially after the auctioneer’s comment about the children wanting everything gone. So I tracked down one of the daughters. When I told her what I’d found, she covered her mouth and started crying before I finished the sentence. She said her father never talked much about his feelings, and none of them knew he’d been writing those letters all those years. A few days later I handed her the box, and she held it like it was the most valuable thing she’d ever owned.
The stove is still in my cabin today. On cold nights, when the fire pops and the wind rattles the windows, I sometimes think about that farmer sitting at his kitchen table after supper, writing one more letter to the woman he never stopped missing.