Dave Wood

Am I the last person in Christendom who still writes letters? You know, the deal where you take a sheet of paper, put it into typewriter, write a message, put it in an envelope, address the envelope and put on a stamp and drop it in a mailbox and hope our feeble United States Postal Service manages to get it to the person you have messaged? You remember that, don’t you? And you say, “Oh, that’s so complicated and EXPENSIVE. Fifty cents! Geeze!” 

I’d have to agree. Still, I persist in this old-fashioned method of communication because I worry about e-mails getting lost in the ether and leaving future historians with the problem of retrieving them when it formerly was easy to find letters—President Roosevelt to Winston Churchill, for instance. This fear was driven home to me when I discovered my great grandmother’s letters to her granddaughter Elsie Wood. An excerpt from one letter told me much about the Mary Parsons Wood that I never knew when she was a little girl growing up in Meadville, Pa., before her family took off for the wilds of Wisconsin in a wagon pulled by oxen.

“For me, at age eight [1831], life was at the spring. And springtime especially was a time of enchantment. The senses were enchanted; gnarly orchards draped in filmy white; roadside nooks and corners; the undergrowth of the woods a riot of blossoms. Then the scents of blossom time; the pungent smell of mint that grew in the woodsy soil of the old-fashioned gardens; the penetrating scent of Gill-Over- the Ground” or catfoot around the cool spring where we went daily for water. It was enchantment for me to sit by the church window in summertime on Sunday morning and hear the murmuring sound of the leaves of the poplar trees by the brook, a little distance away, the distant tinkling of the bells in meadow pastures beyond. Was there enchantment in the sense of taste too? Yes indeed. Think of the fruits galore, of nuts galore, of spicy things in the woods; of maple sweets; of roots and barks, as slippery elm, the inside bark almost as tender as liver; spikenard and mandrake apples. Do you know that in such localities children get an appetite for browsing and nibbling that would astonish you?

“There was a blue clay found in shallow streams. It was grayish blue in color. I remember it in a stony brook by the school in little lumps of various sizes and soft and creamy in the mouth, with no grittiness at all. The children hunted it as a luxury. If the parents know of this practice, I suppose they understood about as much as the children did in the value of such a diet!”

What a wonderful letter, but it’s not even my favorite. When Mary turned 89, her husband Dave Wood passed to his reward, and County Judge Hans Anderson, the hometown newspaper’s indefatigable obit writer penned his obituary, in which he described my great grandad as a “life-long Christian.” Mary took exception, writing to the Whitehall Times that Dave “In the early years of our marriage had not yet seen the light, that he always set the hired man to take the children and me to church,” that it had been very difficult for her until an evangelist from Prescott, Wisconsin, impressed him and he began attending services. Mary requested a correction, but was turned down by editor publisher Beach.

What a woman! What a poet! What a treasure to have in my ancestry—that I would not have known had she not recorded her thoughts and feelings on paper that doesn’t dissolve into the stratosphere when someone’s storage space gets too crowded.

If you’d like to receive a real letter, Dave will write you too. Just call this number and make your request: 715-426-9554.