A reader used to send Paul tomatoes and peaches every summer in big wax-coated boxes that later became file cabinets. I finally got around to the second-to-last one: goodbyes and notes of sympathy from 1995.
Being an antiquarian is like being religious or sexually unorthodox. No one really knows if it's nature or nurture. It appears to be hereditary, but you might inherit it from a step-parent or a teacher. What's completely useless in managing one's antiquarian tendencies is the rule of world-famous "tidying" instructor Marie Kondo: "Does it spark joy?"
Kondo is something of a poetess with her modern takes on Japanese animism (attributing souls to objects). I recall something about folding socks in a way that will make them happy.
But when anything with a hint of the past sparks joy, you are likely to wind up cluttering your beautiful little dwelling with waxen boxes full of old Hallmark cards, obscuring your railroad desk and exposed brick.
So I went through the condolences. I have handled all I need to handle of lavender envelopes and drawings of irises. I might write a book about my husband's first wife, so I kept any note that quoted her ("the thing about young children: you must spoil them") or that told me something about her that I didn't already know. Many a "vibrant" or "intelligent" hit the empty fruit box.
I kept the concrete, the specific. The food-loving critic who remembered a spaghetti supper at the Greenbergs' house. He complimented the salad dressing. "It's from a bottle," Carolyn replied. These things I kept.
Gifts of food. I have a bundle of carrots and beets in my refrigerator. Jody Hardin grew them in his new Carbon Chicken soil. Jody is one of the Hardins of Grady. (Many readers will remember that Joe Hardin ran against Orval Faubus in 1960.) Jody's project aims to take an excess of nutrients (chicken litter) from one place (northwest Arkansas, specifically the Illinois River watershed) to soil that is nutrient-wanting (for example, our dear depleted Delta).
With the fruit boxes, the bundle from a Hardin of Grady reminded me of the old richness of our delta soil. In 1846, Amanda Trulock wrote of her root vegetables: "the land is so new they all grow to tops."
For Trulock, feeding upon the richness of the land and the use of slave labor were one thing. "I have got about 80 or 90 Chickens. Some of them are nearly large enough to Broil, and hens enough setting to hatch as many more, and I make a plenty of butter, and some to give to the Black ones."
What was it like for a woman from Connecticut to own and direct slaves? What was it like for people taken by force from Africa, only two or three generations before, to answer to a woman from Connecticut?
I will never know, but thanks to Marcia, Amanda's unmarried younger sister in Connecticut, we have the best evidence we can get, including words from enslaved people themselves.
After Paul died, I learned from one of Carolyn's best friends (she had many) that a group of women had descended on the Greenbergs' house in Little Rock to reply to the sympathy notes.
Women are really something. There is a card file for food and flowers. There are acknowledgments that went unmailed, addressed in the big, loopy, womanly script of Carolyn's best friend, and signed, in our friend's script, by Paul Greenberg.
. . .
I have a special "keep" stack for people or things I only heard about, most of them good. But literary immortality will be granted to the professor from UAPB who sent his note of condolence with his letter to the editor and his check for renewal. Good taste comes with restrictions, but bad taste is boundless.
Most of the notes I tossed were from fine Arkansas people. The writers didn't want anything; they just sent a note of sympathy to an editorial writer whose wife got a featured obituary. For good reason.
Every single toss hurt. It took me only a few days to reply to hand-written condolences when Paul died. Reading the great mass of correspondence that he got when Carolyn died was a great reminder of how we used to be.