A touching letter

I brought a box full of old letters and other papers going back to the 1940s, 50s and 60s with me to digitize while here in Alpine. All part of my efforts to downsize. It is sort of a miracle that a 4-drawer file cabinet of papers can be reduced to a pin-head, so to speak, if you just take the time to do it. Up to now I've been photographing pages with my iPhone camera. That works faster than using my scanner back home, but it is still cumbersome. But here in Alpine, at the public library, they have a copy machine that has a scanner function that allows you to put a stack of papers into the feeder tray  - 30-40 pages at a time - and they run through in a minute or less and are turned into .pdf files that are then stored on a flash drive that you insert into the copier. You can even do double-sided pages. And you can adjust for density so that light typewritten pages come out with nice black type. This makes it possible to digitize a lot of pages in a short time and get really high quality copies. Then I can come home, transfer the files from the flash drive to my laptop, label all the files, organize them into folders and index them, so that I can easily find what I want. Eventually, given the time, I could have the contents of the two four-drawer file cabinets back in my study all stored on my laptop. If I could bring all the boxes of archival materials that are sitting back home with me here to Alpine, I could get the job done in short order. Or maybe a copier similar to the one here in Alpine exists in a library closer to home. I'll have to look into that.

In any case, knowing that this opportunity exists here, I brought one box with me. That didn't take up too much space in the car. One of the letters I digitized yesterday was written to me by my mother  back on February 27, 1960 - almost 59 years ago.  At that time, I was the minister of the Dummerston Congregational Church, Vermont, and she was an assistant minister in the Lakes Region Parish in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and living in Glover. My father had died about three years earlier, she had come to live with us in Dummerston for a while, then had become a lay minister and gotten this position in Glover, which actually worked out pretty well for her, at least for a time. For one thing, the senior minister there taught her how to drive, which she had never learned  to do as long as dad had been  alive, and she gained a degree of independence she had never had before, which she loved.

She wrote this letter as she was  looking out the window at a snowstorm, and she had gone into almost a state of reverie, thinking back to long-forgotten times in the past. And one of those memories was of the day I was born, March 2, 1933. She wrote a description of the circumstances of my birth which I don't think I had ever heard from her in such detail before I got this letter. I would have been 26 years old at that time. Reading it now (I had almost forgotten I even had  this letter!), I am very touched by it.  I realize with every passing year with even greater conviction that my mother was an amazing woman. Read the letter below and you will see that I was born somewhat prematurely in the hospital in Aurora, Illinois, several miles from Big Rock where dad was a student pastor. Dad was sick with the flu, managed to be with mother during the birth process but then had to go home, had a relapse and never got back to the hospital to be with her. Meanwhile, my survival was at stake - I would not wake up to take nourishment - and mother was there all alone, being told I might not live. Just put yourself in that situation!

Here is the portion of the letter about my birth (you should be able to zoom in on the letter to make it bigger and easier to read):

My mother's description of the day I was born

This is quite moving to me to say the least. There are also some details that are sort of hilarious - like the doctor having just bought a new car and was afraid mother wouldn't make it to the hospital and would give birth in the car and ruin it!

My mother, Olga W. Crockett, circa 1960