…the first line read, “My dearest Eleanor — forty years and I still can’t sleep the night before your letter comes.”
The name none of us knew was Eleanor. And the bundle under that cedar floor was forty-five years of love letters — hers to Eleanor, and Eleanor’s back to her, kept in careful order, tied with a ribbon gone soft.
My aunt Ruth was the one we all quietly pitied. The maiden aunt. Never married, we’d say, with that little sympathetic tilt of the head, as if her life had a hole in the middle of it. And the whole time, under a false floor in her bedroom, there was this — a great love, begun when she and Eleanor were young women in a world that would not let them have it out loud. They loved each other by mail and in stolen weekends for their entire lives. In the last letters they’d finally grown old enough not to care what anyone thought, and they’d bought a little house together, and the family called them “companions,” and they let us, and they laughed about it in ink.
Eleanor passed three years before Ruth did. The final letters are Ruth’s, written to a woman who could no longer answer, because she couldn’t bear to stop.
My aunt was not a lonely woman. She was one of the most loved people I have ever, in my whole life, encountered — I just never had the eyes to see it until she was gone.
We had Ruth’s ashes moved this spring, quietly, to lie beside Eleanor’s, where the two of them had already, long ago, bought the plots side by side. The letters are in an archive now, so the world will remember them.
The aunt we pitied as a lonely spinster had in fact loved, and been loved, more faithfully across a lifetime than any of us who felt sorry for her ever managed.