Painting Portraits on Our Souls

The thieves who burglarized our home almost stole my heritage. My husband and I were attending a Maui Writers Conference where he was a keynote speaker, and I was debuting my first book, The Angels Speak: Secrets from the Other Side, coauthored with Rosemary Dean. I was excited about meeting all the prominent authors, agents and publishers gathered at the Grand Wailea Resort hotel. Then a call jolted me awake at midnight.

Thieves had broken into our house, twenty-five hundred miles away, kicking in our front door. Rick, our vigilant next-door neighbor, sprang into action. He grabbed a 204-10 shotgun and ran up to our front porch, shouting, “I’m coming in!” The robbers dropped the duffel bag they’d stuffed and escaped out the back door, never to be seen again.

Little did they know what precious cargo they had left behind. Nestled in the bottom of the bag, amid credit cards, check books and other valuables, lay an old cigar box in which my mother had stored my father’s love letters. Written when they had just fallen in love until a year after they married in 1928, these letters, jotted in pencil and tied together with a faded pink ribbon, were not only a legacy of a lifetime, but also were the key to my understanding my parents, especially my mother, who had piqued me most of my life.

Born prematurely and kept in an incubator until I gained enough weight to leave the hospital, I had been adopted at four weeks of age by Mary and Tony Martin. While I loved them both and appreciated the stable home life they had given me and my adopted brother, Ron, I often chaffed under the strong thumb of my mother who was bent on controlling my hairstyle, clothes and every other aspect of my life.

During my elementary school years, for example, she insisted on fixing my hair “the Spanish way.” Every night I’d howl in pain as she’d yank a lock of my hair around her finger, plaster it with Stay-Back gel, and bobby-pin the curls in place. The next day at school, these curls, minus the bobby pins, would bounce like stiff springs poking out of my sore head. She thought I looked beautiful, and I felt hideously set apart from everyone else.

While she took great pride in sewing my dresses, using patterns that she liked even though they were woefully out of date, I longed for store-bought clothes, cashmere sweaters and tight wool skirts. She wanted me to look unique, but I just wanted to look like everyone else.

Of course, it didn’t help that I looked nothing like her. I was tall, olive-skinned, gangly and flat-chested as a teenager; she was short, stout and buxom, with white porcelain skin. I was self-conscious not only of our physical disparity, but later of our educational one. By the time I got to college and eventually earned a master’s degree, her limited third-grade education created a chasm between us that, I’m ashamed to say, grew wider with each passing year.

Like my father, she’d been born in Spain and migrated to California as a young girl. While my dad eventually mastered English, my mother never really tried. She spoke a version of “Spanglish,” mixing metaphors and mangling words. A stingray became a “stingwing”; a Mitsubishi was a “Mr. Mishi.” When I was in the third grade and cloak room monitor for the day, the teacher asked me to describe the contents I’d found in a lunch box. I replied, “An apple, some cookies and a peanut butter and jelly sangwich.” Everyone laughed as my cheeks stung from embarrassment. I was so angry at my mother for mispronouncing words for me that I vowed that day to become an English teacher so that no one would ever make fun of my English again.

After my father and brother died, my mother’s care came to rest entirely on my shoulders. She was eighty years old then, suffering from a host of diseases including Alzheimer’s, diabetes and colon cancer. For more than two years, she lived with me as I tried to juggle my everyday life as a wife, mother, English teacher and writer, with the added tasks of being her chauffeur, psychologist and caregiver. The illnesses taxed my patience, and coupled with the resentment I felt that my favorite parent, my father, had left me the sole survivor in an increasingly nightmarish existence, the burden was too much. My anger deepened.

There were times when I’d be cleaning up her colostomy bag or tucking her into bed after finding her wandering about my bedroom in the middle of the night, that I’d moan, “What did he ever see in her?”

I learned the answer to that plaguing question when cleaning out her old house to ready it for sale. I found my dad’s love letters. Without them, I never would have been introduced to the hazel-eyed, raven-haired beauty he fell in love with long before I entered their lives. She no longer was the bewildered, weak and helpless child in my life. Through his words, she was transformed once again into a shy, giggly coquette, sitting out on her lawn, petting her white Angora cat and hoping he’d stop by. When she went away to work in an asparagus cannery, he began writing of his love:

Mary, it has been only a short time since we have become acquainted, but it seems to me as if I knew you all my life. Well, love is blind and it comes all of a sudden and it came to me for you, little girl. And I must let you know this, that I am wishing to see you again and be by your side and see you smile and talk to you once more. For now my love for you is getting greater every minute.

He closed his love note with “an ocean of love and a kiss on top of each wave” and wrote S.W.A.S.K. on the envelope: “Sealed With a Sweet Kiss.” Less than a month later, he was hinting of marriage:

Honey, my love for you is very great for when I love, I love the Spanish way on right ‘till the end, and my heart craves for you to its fullest extent.

Then he drew an arrow with their initials on it with hearts falling from his initials. Later when it became clear that she could marry him only after her older sister, Julia, married first, a Spanish tradition, he lamented:

For you I live and for you I die, just for you, Mary, and now you surely have my heart burning with love for you and honey, my poor heart is calling, just calling for its mate which I am sure is you, for since I met you, it seems to me as if this world is different and better than before, and you are the one that has made this happiness come to me. . . .

Tony and Mary eloped and, although they lived in San Leandro, California, she continued to go away to Isleton, about a fifty-mile trip, with her siblings during asparagus season, and he resumed his love letters. He wrote about his struggles through the Great Depression, working during the week at a factory and painting cars on the weekend for a dollar an hour. He chronicled family spats and gossip, his garden laden with tulips, pansies and flowering peach trees and his reluctance to buy a much-needed battery for his car at a whopping $8.50. But, mostly, he revealed his strong feelings for her and how much he missed her. Because I had loved him so much, I couldn’t help but start to appreciate the woman who clearly was the love of his life.

In the middle of the night, when caring for my mother’s ailments had left me wide awake and frustrated, I’d reach for those letters and read them line by line until peace would at last descend upon me, and I could fall asleep again. I have since thought of the lyrics of “Amazing Grace,” about being blind then seeing—how true that was for me. As each page lifted another filter I had placed through years of resentment and misunderstanding, a clearer, brighter picture of my mother shone forth.

Through my father’s eyes, I finally began to understand just what it was he saw in her. His words painted a new picture for me. I began to recognize what he had always seen: her basic goodness, hard-won wisdom and practicality—those qualities which he admired so much about her and which in my childishness I had refused to see. He looked forward to the faithful, though ungrammatical, letters she wrote to him. He was proud of her “Spanish way,” because it was strong and true. She loomed before me now like a wise genie released from a bottle, imbued with wisdom and deep understanding . . . taking shape as a lover of life with its shifting colors and hues . . . then reforming to reveal an innocent soul with an unwavering faith in a God that would see us through all things . . . and ultimately emerging as a simple, contented woman, intent on being the best wife and mother she knew how to be. My father’s words were like teardrops on snow, melting my heart and releasing old disappointments and stubborn hurts. I realized that I loved her—and always had. It just took his words of love to help me discern the truth about myself.

I shudder to think of Dad’s love letters almost being stolen by thieves. Without them, I would never have been given the gift of insight which bolstered me through a most difficult passage in life. During my mother’s final years, she was in a nursing home in a wing specializing in Alzheimer’s patients. I went to see her nearly every weekend, often taking her to a nearby park where we’d feed the ducks, play the game Aggravation, or watch the canoes glide across the lake. I enjoyed those times immensely, savoring those moments when she’d connect with the present and her surroundings. I noticed her sense of wonder, her appreciation of nature and her reverence for all of life. We’d talk for hours about the old days, this time laughing about my Spanish ringlets and skirts with petticoats. At times I felt my father’s smiling presence, like a soft glow in the periphery, whispering, “See, Jennifer? Now you know why I love her.” At her funeral, I sang her praises in a loving tribute to a life well-lived.

Although I became a published author long after my father died, I’d like to think that somehow he knows what a significant impact his words had upon me and how much I have come to value the written word for its illumination in our lives. His love letters were a holy legacy, as all heartfelt writings are. How sacred is the written word that paints portraits on our souls.

Jennifer Martin