Good night dear, love to you

Honey that cake  you sent me surely is fine.  I have been taking a hunk of it with me for lunch the last two days.

The typing is faded and the paper stiff with age, though the simple signature looks as if it could have been scrawled yesterday, if people still used pencils.  Roy Osee Frantz typed the letter on the evening of August 9 in some unknowable year.  The postmark is obscured,  but the envelope’s first-class postage — then three cents, composed of green one-cent and red two-cent stamps commemorating the bicentennial of Washington’s birth  — suggests it was 1932. A Tuesday, then.

Dear Sweetheart:  I surely appreciated the fine letter I got this morning even though you told me all that news Sunday.  You see I don’t get home early enough in the evenings to get the mail. 

I found the letter among poultry ephemera I purchased at an antique show years ago, being inordinately fond of history and hens — I keep a small flock — and also being — I think this is the word I’m grasping for — weird.  The envelope bears a bright, cheery logo for Frantz Poultry Farms in Rocky Ford, Colorado:  Sunshine chicks.  High altitude stamina.  Mountain bred.

It is addressed simply to Mrs. Roy O. Frantz in Rocky Ford.  No street address; ZIP codes had not been invented.

Sweetheart was Ethel May Frantz, née Metsker, who would have just turned 27.  Maybe that explains the cake.  Or maybe it was just an everyday yellow cake she made in a well-worn kitchen, using rich eggs from the hens she tended and butter,  or maybe less expensive margarine, what my grandmother called “oleo.”   And then sent 110 miles due west to Roy on the farm where he was working.    Hard.

Boyee it was eleven when I got to bed last night and I was so tired that I could sleep hardly a bit. Got up at 6 and worked till 8 then ate supper and didn’t feel like working any more this evening.

You can find a lot online these days, so I can tell you that Roy and Ethel May had three sons — John “Jackie”, Don and Bob  — who as boys worked at the feed store the family later owned in Pueblo. At some point, Ethel May taught home ec. I know that Roy died of a heart attack in 1974, though I can’t tell you when he was born.   And that Ethel May had outlived him by 28 years when she died at 97.

Before all that,  though, there was the time of the letter and of the poultry farm  — the early ’30s,  the trough of the Great Depression.  Maybe that’s why Roy was away from home working long days in the summer sun, shipping out some fine cauliflower, so sweet and good.  Maybe he had to.   I couldn’t say for sure, any more than I could tell you what Roy and Ethel May said to each other in the middle of the endless nights after their young son Jackie died.

“Fell into grain elevator. Smothered?”  reads the online genealogical record. And, under occupation:  “Child.”  Died in 1943, or thereabouts.

In every life, sorrows;  some unthinkable.

Yet I want to imagine that Roy and Ethel May were mostly happy, that — at least on this night, the night Roy typed the letter that decades later ended up in a packet of poultry ephemera — they were young and healthy, separated but dreaming together of better times,  perhaps of children not yet born, or born and not yet dead.  Conjuring by force of love a shared and mysterious life unfolding through all the unknowable days to come, full of hope and something they were too modest to call courage.

So I hold gently this artifact of their long-ago lives, a few words that passed between two people who cared for each other,  either of whom might have been me — or you — given a slight dislocation of time or space or circumstance.

On Aug. 9, 1932, though, it was Roy Osee Frantz, weary after another day’s work in the fields, but not too tired,  never too tired, to write his sweetheart, Ethel May.

I am going to take a bath and go to bed — wish my little wife was here to wash my back and then to go to bed with me. 
                    Good night dear, love to you,
                                                    Roy   

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Tags: antiques, chickens, Colorado, depression, ephemera, history, letters, love, nostalgia, poultry