The COVID Chronicles, cursive and the power of preserving stories

“For the last four months, I’ve been in charge of a weekly collection of writings by the women in my neighborhood as they’ve documented their hopes, fears and anxieties about the global pandemic; we’ve coined them The COVID Chronicles,” writes Kat Dayton. | Adobe Stock

“Oh, I read your card from Grandma and Papa. I hope you don’t mind,” I mentioned to my newly 17-year old. He’d propped up the birthday card on the kitchen counter earlier that morning after a French toast breakfast and a scavenger hunt for presents.

Reaching for the card in question he replied, “no, I’m glad you did actually. I couldn’t quite read all of Grandma’s cursive.”

So, I grabbed the card and read out loud the entirety of his grandmother’s loving wishes and accoutrements. And he smiled broadly.

For the last four months, I’ve been in charge of a weekly collection of writings by the women in my neighborhood as they’ve documented their hopes, fears and anxieties about the global pandemic; we’ve coined them The COVID Chronicles.

Each week, two or three women write a submission and then I email it out to a group of a hundred or so women. The contributors are encouraged to write their truth. The good. The bad. The ugly. And the beautiful, too.

We’ve had poetry submissions. We’ve had stream of consciousness submissions. We’ve had short ones, long ones, sad ones and silly ones, too.

One such poem was about the utter joy of going braless during the first weeks of full quarantine. It created a bit of a stir.

Most of the women email their COVID Chronicle submissions to me. But not this week. This week, I got a call from an 84-year-old lifelong single woman who wanted to contribute. The only problem: she doesn’t type.

“Can you read cursive?” she asked me tentatively over the phone. I assured her I could and then arranged a time to pick up her longhand submission.

As she greeted me at her door, both of us masked, she cradled the four pages in a sealed envelope to her breast.

“I hope what I wrote is OK,” she said. Again, I assured her it would be — it was her experience and her truth.

The next day as I was waiting in a long queue on the telephone, I carefully unsealed the envelope, uncurled the handwritten pages and began to type.

I typed every word of her looping penciled tale. The story of her parents in the global pandemic of 1918 — her father’s survival on an influenza-ridden Army base in Georgia and her mother’s survival as a quasi-orphan in Salt Lake City — and then of the author’s own experience in the pandemic of 2020.

Of her isolation. Of her hope. Of her finding solace in “talking” to herself in her journal every night. And of the grace of having a large property of problems that occupied her time when there was nothing else to do.

She ended her handwritten Chronicle with the simple line, “and I am eternally grateful.”

I couldn’t help muttering softly to myself, “my thoughts exactly.”

I was feeling ever so grateful, too. So grateful I’d learned to read and write cursive in Mrs. Mount’s third-grade class. And so grateful that I could now use that knowledge to memorialize this woman’s story.

For her sake. But mostly for the rest of ours.

Kat Dayton is a freelance writer and mother of three wild boys.

from Deseret News https://ift.tt/3ggqysG