Anna Elfenbaum

“Secretly, she fretted about her vanished children, lost to unknown stories in what was then a very distant elsewhere. She also had the sorrow all Kerry people have when they’re not in Kerry, but this she countered with copious letter-writing. Letters took several days to write, the lost art of composition then a tenet of civility, and sheets of blotting paper with traceries of script indicative of the hand-pressed, my-hand-to-your-hand nature of the thing. She’d write those letters until the day she died, her forefinger inked and with a permanent pen-welt. She had many correspondents. One was Aunt Nollaig, who went to America, and defeated the physics of space by writing ever smaller on the single page of the aerogramme, her character apparent the moment Doady ran the knife carefully along the dotted line and held to the light the script that with Ganga’s loupe would take days to fully decipher. Doady’s own missives went across the river and over the mountains and brought replies that were read over several times, then folded back into their envelopes and stored inside a foil-lined tea chest stamped CEYLON, where in ink, paper and penmanship a kind of inner Kerry endured, and could be visited easier than the real thing.”
― Niall Williams, This Is Happiness