Letter from Lettsworth

A few weeks ago I mailed a letter from the post office in Lettsworth, Louisiana. If you are unfamiliar with Lettsworth this will strike you as unremarkable. After all, mailing letters is what people usually do at post offices—it’s one of those humdrum, everyday acts that most of us perform without thinking much about, unless we’re complaining about the speed or the price or other perceived shortcomings of the service. But people who are familiar with Lettsworth are going to be suspicious. A tiny, unincorporated slip of a place along LA Highway 1 in the farest-flung north of Pointe Coupee parish, Lettsworth’s four short streets comprise the only interruption to the flat expanse of cotton and sorghum fields that stretches towards the western horizon, somewhere beyond which flows the Atchafalaya. It is not now, nor presumably ever was, a much-visited place. Indeed, Lettsworth is one of those places that seems fated to always being driven through, rather than driven to. This impression is underscored by the hamlet’s most prominent building—an achingly atmospheric old railroad depot gracefully subsiding into ruin where the tracks cross the highway, and an unforgettable landmark for anyone who has driven this stretch of LA1. Although Wikipedia tells me that the population of Lettsworth as of 2005 numbered 202, not one of them was around on the silent spring day when I passed through, and the whole landscape exuded that “land-that-time-forgot” emptiness that one is sometimes struck by when driving through depopulated parts of Louisiana’s old agricultural heartland.

There was certainly no-one at the post office, a red, white and blue trailer standing in a cane field a mile or so north of “town.” Set inexplicably far back from the road, the post office was served by a fifty-yard-long concrete driveway that looked like it belonged in front of a much bigger building. As if the planners had built the driveway in anticipation of getting something larger—a Piggly Wiggly, perhaps—that never materialized. But since this enormous thoroughfare made its grand sweep past a single, blue mailbox standing in the parking lot, and since beside me on the passenger seat lay a letter in search of a mailbox, I stood on the brakes and swerved in.

The letter—a fat envelope festooned with stamps and sealed with glittery stickers—was from my eleven-year-old daughter, Mathilde, to her pen pal Millicent, who lives in England. Tilly had been working on this letter for most of the preceding Sunday, filling page after legal pad page with florid descriptions of everything happening in her world. She had illustrated with pictures and flourishes, included a photograph, then sealed the whole masterpiece in a big envelope and plastered four Louisiana “Forever” stamps on to cover the postage. She had lined the stamps up in perfect precision and taken pleasure in copying Millie’s exotic-sounding London address and postcode (Athenlay Road, London, SE15 3EN) onto the envelope. In all, the letter represented a handmade labor of love on the part of our daughter, an inveterate writer who makes sense of every thought, deed and experience by writing about it. Founded during a summer trip to England several years ago, the friendship with Millicent—the endearingly precocious daughter of our coolest and most bohemian friends—is a strange and sparkling thing. Millie’s life is as urban as Mathilde’s is rural. She lives with her writer parents and young twin brother and sister in a cheerfully shambolic, Victorian pile in a hipsterish part of South London. It’s the sort of house where at any time you might find a potter’s wheel on the kitchen table, a pot of some Afghan stew simmering on the stove, a bouzouki band tuning up in the living room, and five or six kids taking turns sliding down the banisters. Millie throws pottery, learns Mandarin, and makes her way to school through the urban bedlam of London rush hour on a scooter. And although the girls’ day-to-day circumstances could scarcely be more different, they connected over a shared love of story writing, and spent most of their week together on the floor, taking turns adding twists to a tale of their own devising named “Stars In Swords.” That was three years ago, and despite the fact that they haven’t seen or spoken to one another since, they have sustained their friendship via a bright thread of correspondence. So the fact that I was about to consign the most recent installment of “Stars In Swords” to a mailbox in front of an apparently deserted post office in the middle of a cane field required a measure of faith in the institution of the United States Post Office. As I slipped Mathilde’s letter into the slot I was gripped by anxiety that this precious thing, invested with all the ephemeral enthusiasm of our daughter’s imagination, would never reach her distant friend. With visions of the letter lying there, moldering and unread in the months to come, I drove away cursing my impetuousness for not having waited until I found a “proper” post office from which to send it.

Four days. That’s how long it took the combined might of the U.S.P.S. and the Royal Mail to spirit Mathilde’s letter from a Point Coupee cane field, across the Atlantic Ocean and through the slot in a front door on Athenlay Road, London. I know this because, the Saturday after my drive through Lettsworth we were emailed a photo of a beaming Millicent standing by her front door, waving Tilly’s letter. How? Did someone in that tiny trailer slam her fist down on a flashing red button the moment I drove away? Did a biplane barnstormer piloted by a man in goggles and white scarf swoop down into the cane field to collect the only letter of the day, and spirit it to some top-secret center specializing in the expedition of children’s dreams? All for the price of four Louisiana “Forever” stamps? I cannot begin to grasp the logistics required to achieve this feat, then repeat it day after day from thousands of blue boxes in every corner of the land. Sure we all complain about the petty annoyances that sometimes attend our dealings with the post office, but that day it seemed like the very cornerstone of civilization, and I won’t hear a word against it.

—James Fox-Smith, publisher