Clara Whitaker’s terrier, Buster, growled at the garden gate as a postal van hissed past. The dog always bristled at strangers, though they’d never quite fathomed why—perhaps it was the van’s oil-slick sheen or the way the driver’s cap perpetually shadowed his face. She stooped to collect the envelope, its wax seal shimmering like a medieval relic. For years, letters had arrived only in digital form, zapping across screens with the sterile hiss of a modem.
The paper felt foreign in her hands, heavy with the dust of bygone correspondence. Memories unfolded like a frayed tapestry: her childhood, poring over a Royal Mail box with a magnifying glass, waiting for postcards from cousins in Cornwall or birthday greetings from Aunt Margaret in Leeds. Those were the days when every envelope held a drama—solicitations for charity, faded photographs, the occasional anonymous love letter smudged with rain.
Now, of course, everything thrived in pixels. The mailbox had become a graveyard of bills and circulars.
She slit the envelope open. Inside lay an invitation to a garden party in Manchester for her grandniece’s eighteenth birthday—a coming-out affair, all white gowns and strawberries drenched in champagne. Clara blinked. Had it been decades since she’d last seen the girl? A flicker of a memory: a girl in Brighton, once, with a laugh like chinking teacups, flanked by her parents who fretted over her “late blooming.” Clara had attended a wedding there too, years ago—a lavish affair with a string quartet and too many tiers of wedding cake.
Her mother’s family had once lived in a village near Liverpool, crammed into a house that echoed with the footsteps of uncles, cousins, and aunts who arrived in caravans. They’d stuffed the kitchen with trifle and crumpets, their stories spilling into the midnight hours. Clara had adored them all, though they’d been a kaleidoscope of chaos. There was Aunt Phyllis from Bristol, always trailing lavender perfume, who claimed she’d kissed a sailor in 1944 and never stopped laughing since. Cousin Ruth, a nurse in Gloucester, who kept a jar of elderflower cordial to “soothe broken hearts.” Uncle Bernard from Brighton, who once glued a cat to the mantelpiece in a fit of drunken whimsy and blamed it on the cat.
The house had been a haven then, but now it felt like a ghost in the attic. She and Harold lived in a cottage detached from the world, where two guests could only fit by standing in the hallway. The thought of packed rooms and familial chatter made her ache with a strange, foreign nostalgia.
The invitation lay heavy on the kitchen table. The heatwave had turned Manchester sweltering. And what of the girl? Would she even recognize Clara beneath the shadows of age, or would she be some sharp-featured stranger, all iPhone apps and abbreviations Clara couldn’t parse?
She tucked the card into a drawer, where it joined a rusted letter opener and a dried-out pen. Better to send a gift, a card with a pressed forget-me-not. Some memories were best left to drift like smoke in an old parlor. Clara stepped into the dusk, the sound of Buster’s paws crunching on gravel, and let the silence settle like a shroud.