Saving the Present for the Future: Preserving Our Correspondences           

Saving the Present for the Future: Preserving Our Correspondences           
For centuries, letter writing has left a record of individual lives. A detail from "Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid," circa 1670, by Johannes Vermeer. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland. PD-US
Jeff Minick
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On New Year’s Day, mostly to amuse some restless grandchildren, I carried a drawer from the filing cabinet in the basement up the steps and into the kitchen.

The three younger kids and I gathered around the table and pulled some treasures from the drawer: the little bonnet their toddler great-great-great grandfather had worn on the ship from Ireland to America well over a century ago, the coins collected as a child by my deceased wife, including several silver dollars from the 1920s, and a few other odds and ends.

Jeff Minick
Jeff Minick
Author
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
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