My husband and I spent the weekend childproofing to keep the house safe for our suddenly-crawling-and-standing son. In addition to the standard fare of bolting the bookshelves to the wall, locking up the cabinets and removing heavy objects from high places, we also decommissioned a raised, slate-covered platform that once seated a wood-burning stove.
The stove, the chimney it was routed to, the platform and the walls around it were all deemed completely unsafe by the house inspector when I bought the house, and then confirmed unsafe once again by Buck, the charismatic figurehead of Buck's Stove Palace. A year ago, we gave away the stove on freecycle. Now it was time to remove the pointless, pointy perch that once housed it.
As Jon chipped away at the platform with a sledgehammer and other manly tools borrowed from our neighbor, I fed Theo his first whole banana in a little mesh sack that he could hold and maneuver himself. It turned out to be an extremely effective distraction from the mess and noise of deconstruction in the next room. Theo was mesmerized by his authority over the banana, and the cause-and-effect arc from desire to fulfillment that lay entirely in his little hands. As he successfully sucked and squeezed a sludge of banana through the mesh, I was focused on managing the sweet, sticky ooze that was starting to glue the two of us together.
Jon approached the couch holding a little baggie with a piece of paper tied inside of it. He held it up incredulously. "There's a note in here," he said with reverence. "I found it inside the platform." I'm a message-in-a-bottle romantic freak--always have been. With my sticky fingers, I impatiently waited as Jon untied the crumbling twist-tie holding the bag together and extracted the rolled-like-parchment piece of ripped notebook paper. He read out loud the following (spelling as written):
Sample [a hand-drawn arrow points to a small piece of plastic taped with masking tape and holding two, tiny marijuana buds. There is also a quarter taped to the note. Another arrow in the left margin of the page follows the word "Dank" and points to the list of initials.]
Peace out, SPJ, RAY, JE
Well, this explained a lot about the quality and usefulness of our defunct wood-burning-stove system! The folks building it had more important things to do than accurate carpentry and enduring tile work. They were communing with the people of the future--us. Only we managed to find their note less than seven years after it was written, rather than the many generations they seem to have expected.
This strangest of love letters made my day. I am passionate about letters...and semi-accidental letters between strangers are the most poetic of them all, in my mind. In the space between what was intended and what was received lives poetry. Together, these three stoned men "of the past" and this unexpecting little family of three "of the future" composed a poem.
Your turn!
Write your own "Hello, people of the future" letter!
Who are the people of the future you imagine inhabiting the place where you live? What would you want to say to them? Write them a letter, in the form of a poem, to give them a sense of who you are, the time in which you lived, and what is meaningful to you about the home that you occupy now--and they'll occupy at the time of the poem's reading. If you could tape some little thing to the note that signified who you are or how you are feeling in this moment, what would it be?
