For the past three Fridays in a row, I’ve shown up to my summer job at the American Museum of Natural History with a duffel bag slung over my shoulder and a bus or train ticket on my phone. At 2 p.m., instead of hanging out around the museum or playing frisbee in the park, I promptly clock out and run to catch the B train to Port Authority or Penn Station to make my way to Rhode Island for the weekend. It’s become a running joke amongst my co-workers — they’ll begin asking me to see a movie on Sunday and then stop mid-sentence, already knowing my answer.
I’ve been spending summers in Rhode Island since I was a baby, out on Block Island with my parents to celebrate their anniversary where they got married. When I was a kid, my family would rent a house in Misquamicut for a week at the beginning of hurricane season, wading through the waves every day until they got too big to see over. In elementary school, I went to day camp in Providence, and in middle school, I started going to sleepaway camp in South Kingstown.
My time in Rhode Island wasn’t just confined to the summers, though. My whole family would make the trek every Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, as well as a few weekends here and there — piling into our car and following I-95 to Nibbles, the big blue bug. From there, it would only be five more minutes to Grandpa’s house, where roses climbed up the porch columns and cardinals sat on the bird feeder. Depending on how late and cold it was, you could find him sitting on the porch swing, waving at my brother and me as my dad pulled into the driveway.
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My grandfather had an uncanny knack for sending me a letter just when I needed it most. During my first week of sleepaway camp, which left me nauseatingly homesick, I got a letter in the mail saying that he’d accidentally eaten some of the dog biscuits I bought for the neighbor’s dog, and that they were “not bad!”. Three weeks into my time at college, on a particularly awful day (I cried in the Bursley Dining Hall, a new low at the time), he sent me $20 and a note instructing me to “get myself some ice cream or cigars.” It was almost like clockwork — whenever I most needed something to hang onto, a letter would arrive.
I got other sorts of letters, too, especially when I was at camp. He would carefully cut out newspaper articles he thought I might like and staple them to sheets of lined yellow paper before stuffing them into envelopes. He told me what he was eating for dinner, what the weather was like in New York and the goings on around the house. He would often add postscripts running alongside the body of the letter — typically witty one liners or reminders that I didn’t have to reply to his letters as long as I was having fun.
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The sleepaway camp that I went to has been located at Turner Point on Great Salt Pond for more than 135 years, and for at the very least the last 30, they’ve been performing a ceremony called Chips. During Chips, every camper, the night before they leave camp for the summer, places something of significance to them in the camp-wide fire. After a Chips fire, the ashes are collected and spread over the land so that a part of you lives at camp after you leave. I could never bring myself to burn one of the letters I received, but many an envelope of my grandfather’s made its way into the fire and into the forests that surrounded the camp.
My grandfather lived almost all 103 years of his life in the smallest state in the country, meaning that there’s very few places in Rhode Island that I can’t connect back to him. Driving through Narragansett, I can see the deck he built on the beach house my great-grandparents owned. Meandering around the stalls at the weekly farmer’s market on Blackstone Boulevard, I see the trails that he used to walk and say “hi” to the tree my dad and uncle planted in his honor. Lying on the chaise lounge in his backyard, if I squint just right, I can still see the duck made out of leaves in the neighbor’s tree — it’s just that this time the Red Sox aren’t playing out of his pocket radio.
It sounds cliché, and I suppose it is, but being in Rhode Island makes me feel closer to him, although I don’t necessarily mean that in the spiritual sense. It’s more that, physically, I can see him all over the ocean state. The deck he made still hosts barbecues in the summertime, new Chips ashes are spread over the ones containing his envelopes, the roses still climb up the porch columns and the cardinals still flock to the bird feeder. Every weekend when I go back, I’m reminded of all the incredible moments I had with him.
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It is here where I should explain the title, because while this article is certainly a love letter, it is not explicitly addressed to Rhode Island. But to me, my grandfather and the state that he lived in are forever intertwined, so a love letter to one must be a love letter to the other. And I truly do love them both, Rhode Island and my grandfather — so if there is some sort of afterlife in which I get to see him again, I hope we’ll be looking at the ocean from the cliffs of Beavertail State Park and sharing Del’s.
Statement Columnist Lucy Del Deo can be reached at ldeldeo@umich.edu