Discovering My Grandparents’ 146 Daily Love Letters

They were buried under clutter for 50 years.

August 1929, Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina. After a summer living apart and writing to each other breathlessly each day, Riley and Clara were inseparable (and dressed identically) during their honeymoon.

In the early 1970s, my 80-something grandfather would drive his old pickup truck through the streets of Jackson, Mississippi collecting scrap metal and dragging it home.

Back at his house, with its vegetable garden, chicken coop, bee hives, and rabbit hutches, he piled the metal high. The heap of tangled shine and rust grew in the grass like an enormous, spiky ant hill.

“They lived in the suburbs, but they were ‘country come to town’,” my dad says of his in-laws’ house.

My older cousins from Los Angeles would travel to Mississippi every summer and spend weeks sorting the metal, hauling it to the recycler (driving the truck at age eleven by themselves), and earning some serious walking around money.

I never knew my mom’s parents. My family’s stories about them almost always include a mention of the stuff that filled their house, attic, and yard.

Stuff that buried a family treasure for a half century.

Each letter is like a time capsule of the stage of their relationship, daily goings on, and life in the twenties.

Long-distance lovers pouring their hearts into daily letters

My grandparents were engaged in the spring of 1929. They met while they were both undergraduate students at State Teacher’s College (now the University of Southern Mississippi) in Hattiesburg. A shared love of education, history, and teaching brought them close together.

But that year their summer jobs as college professors took them to different cities. Riley, my grandfather, moved to Nashville, Tennessee to teach at George Peabody College (now Vanderbilt University) while Clara, my grandmother, stayed to teach at State Teachers College in Hattiesburg.

So, every day that summer, they wrote a love letter to each other.

On some particularly lonely days, one of them might write two, or even three, letters.

What must be stirring in one’s soul to feel the need to crank out three, separate, long-winded, love letters in one day?

On June 11, 1929, my grandfather wrote one letter before breakfast, one after church, and another at noon!

They exchanged 146 letters in a bit more than 60 days.

My mom and her two sisters had grown up knowing about this burst of letter writing. But they had seen only some of the letters- the ones their mom kept which she had received from Riley.

They never knew what happened to the other set of letters- the ones their mother had written to their father. Their mother never mentioned them, and my mom and aunts thought they were lost for good.

Finding the lost set of love letters

My grandfather died in 1973, and after my grandmother died in the spring of 1984, my mom and her two sisters needed to prepare their cluttered, childhood home to be sold.

The white, single-story, wooden house at 305 Sewanee Drive was chock full with the artifacts of two lifetimes. So was the enormous, stand-up attic and the double-lot yard.

A lot of the things were junk.

My grandfather and his business partner built the house in 1952. It is actually a duplex. A wall runs down the middle. There are two kitchens. Two main bedrooms. They planned to rent out one side while living in the other, but they filled up the rental side with stuff and never rented it out.

While busy with the thousand tasks that must be done after the last of your parents dies, my mom and aunts didn’t think to carefully look for the lost letters while clearing out the house.

They sweated as they drug boxes out of the hot and humid attic. In the weeks following their mother’s death, they continuously gave away, and threw away, boxes of fabric, books, kitchen stuff, and ancient clothes.

Then, just by happen stance, in the attic, inside a large box, under a deep stack of clothes, they found the entire set of missing love letters that their mother had written to their father.

The letters were hand written, and typically quite lengthy. This one written by Clara is double-sided and goes for more than twelve pages.

My grandfather’s long-winded sentences professing his love for my grandmother are often hard to decipher due to his swooping, cursive handwriting.

Sharing the letters publicly

Now, 92 years after they were written, and with permission from our family, I’m posting the letters here in this Dear Sweetheart publication on Medium.

Why?

I want you all to be able to bask in the letters’ warmth.

Marvel at the expressions of infatuation.

Be inspired by my grandparents’ boundless optimism for a future life together that they imagined would be filled with unparalleled happiness.

To read some of my favorite parts of their love letters, checkout my other post My Grandparents’ Love Letters Make Me Smile.

The Author

Eric Burns is curious and inspired by other creatives who pursue their passions. He’s a full-time dad and was previously a product design manager with a passion for the employee journey side of design operations (recruiting, education, and culture). He honed his UX design and UX research skills at frog design and led different design teams at Uber.