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Dear Hugo,

Nearly a year since my last it's-been-two-whole-years letter, and I finally got Covid, unless I didn't. I am frustratingly unable to test positive, whether rapid test or PCR.

Your best friend at school tested positive, and then a few days later you did, and then you spent the weekend with your dad who tested positive, and then I got sick and the urgent care doc said I definitely have Covid, test results be damned. (You felt fine the whole time, btw.)

But as someone whose day job centers so much around documentation and paper trails and compliance, the missing second line on the test strip upsets me. If it's not documented, it didn't happen, as far as the auditors are concerned. HR will not give me extra sick leave without the positive test, so I had to use vacation time. What if I'm sick forever but I can't prove I was ever sick at all? How do I convince myself I'm not faking, let alone other people?

Dear Hugo,

We've come to the end of the Long Halloween. It seems that when October 31 falls on a Monday, costumery starts the Friday before and goes straight through til the Tuesday morning sugar hangover. Plus we went to the PA Renaissance Faire, another fancy-dress occasion, the weekend before that. You've been a Knight, a Dead Knight (expressed via a spooky demeanor), and a Skeleton. Or was the skeleton just the final form of the knight, stripped bare of armor?

Similarly, I was first a living queen and then a dead one, thanks to a cheap velvet gown from Shein-via-Poshmark and some fake blood (I stole one of the capsules Robin gave you for your birthday. Sorry!). It's a fun dress but suitable only for costume wear, I think, since it's a scratchy and hot synthetic material that may or may not be full of lead, the sort of fast fashion garment that is about the same quality as a Spirit Halloween ensemble anyway.

Dear Hugo,

The good news is that I didn't forget how to write things that aren't emails.

The Weymouth Center/Boyd House was great. I had a quiet, sunny room to myself for two weeks in North Carolina. And it wasn't even on a former plantation!

(It was on a former country retreat of a once-popular novelist, drunkard, and foxhunting enthusiast. Still an improvement!)

Dear Hugo,

in the interval since I last worked on an unfinished, research-heavy newsletter about the Blockley Almshouse, UPenn, and the long history of grave robbing in West Philadelphia, it seems that the Buttondown newsletter platform has deleted all my drafts. Punishment for my sloth! Just as the burn on my upper lip is punishment for succumbing to the temptations of the drive-thru menu (hot grease splatter from a very fresh McChicken sandwich). Minor sins, minor hells.

Starting Monday, I will be at the Weymouth Center in Southern Pines, NC for two weeks of focused writing, so perhaps I'll have the time to recreate my lost draft while you hang out with Granny and Grandpa at their new home in Greensboro. Maybe I should even try to write as a real essay. Part of the piece involves the People's Townhomes, and one reason I've had trouble finishing is that the story keeps changing every day. Yesterday we thought the encampment was going to be broken up this morning, but the cops never came. Likely I'll be at the writing residency when the tents finally come down.

In the meantime, I have reproduced here a short historical treatise I snagged on my daily library catalog fishing expedition, keyword surfing on the history of British wool production. Just like the lost newsletter, it involves burial rites, plus Jesuitical Tricks, drunken good-wives, and Bowels that yern [sic] like a red-hot oven. Line breaks added at my discretion, as I'm sure the printer would have done in his day if he were laying out the page with an email inbox in mind.

Dear Hugo,

Two years minus two days ago, I went to see a Portrait of a Lady on Fire at the Ritz and then dancing at Ulana's. Two years minus one day ago, I brought you with me up to Brith Sholom House for a tenants' rally.

You were pretty bored but they did have donuts, and many senior citizens to exclaim over your cuteness.

Dear Hugo,

I finally finished an essay, and even submitted it somewhere. It's a more refined version of my musings on the Bernard Cone Photograph Albums from a few newsletters ago.

The essay is still mostly about portraits, but I did veer off into a paragraph about modernism and machines and humans. My art history major is such a distant foggy memory at this point that I spent a fair amount of time just trying to recall concepts and artists I once knew, Googling phrases like "Italian futurism photography" or "modernist photo gears" and slowly circling closer to the dim image in my mind. Fortunately, if there is one college class I kinda remember, it's my Early 20th Century Avant Garde Art seminar. I love a good painting of industrial equipment. Charles Demuth's is in my Top 5 Favorite Artworks list, for sure.

Dear Hugo,

my brain is still fragmented in a million pieces, though somewhat recovered since last time I wrote.

For instance, I sewed a dress. A nice linen dress and I’m not even ashamed of the darts and seams. Linen is a little harder to work with than cotton, I found, but not as tricky as that plaid rayon blend I made my first dress out of (a poor choice). I enjoy learning the characteristics of each fabric as I go. I’m beginning to understand what it means when someone says a particular textile “sews beautifully.”

Dear Hugo,

I can’t remember where I read it (probably Slate, it seems like a real Slate type of thing) but there was an article, years ago, by these parents who had proudly created a whole digital identity suite for their new baby. They registered a Gmail address, created a Facebook account, maybe even registered a domain for the baby, for said baby to inherit at such a time as it required these things.

It seemed goofy to me. Even if society hasn’t collapsed in ten years’ time, I hope to god that Facebook will have, or at least that no teenager will have any interest in joining that early-21st-century disaster. I hope setting up a Facebook account for a baby will turn out be the equivalent of my parents having invested in a personal fax machine for me at the time of my birth.

But I did set up an email for you when I was setting up this newsletter. You were my first subscriber. But these aren’t my first or only letters to you. There are books of handwritten ones, too, dating from my pregnancy. Those handwritten ones are more personal. They contain things I would never say online.

Dear Hugo,

in my Blue Stoop class this week we were tasked with bringing a photograph related to our writing project. I could have brought an old family photo, or one that I snapped on my phone while talking with Uncle Mike, maybe the persimmon tree where their dachshund once treed a possum.

Instead, though, I found this digital collection through the Greensboro History Museum website. Bernard Cone, one of the Cone Mills men, was also a hobbyist photographer. I’m a little astonished that this is so buried in the history museum’s website. Documentary interest aside, a lot of the images are just really beautiful.

Dear Hugo,

We have returned from our Grand Tour of North Carolina. Between Topsail, Raleigh, Greensboro, and Charlotte (plus the Asheville wedding in May) I’ve covered most of the state. You would have stayed with Cousin Nora the rest of the summer if I’d let you. Maybe we’ll go back for Labor Day – I didn’t get to visit all my Greensboro research sites, and we left the sleeping bag there.

I do have many research-objects to study and an interview to transcribe. Still trying to figure out exactly where Mom’s family lived before they moved to the current place in Pleasant Garden in the 60s. She doesn’t remember – she was only five when they moved, and says the adults only ever called it “the old place.” I asked Uncle Mike where this old place was exactly and he deadpanned, “Oh, over there.” But I did get a little more information. I know it was a 17-acre farm off of Old Battleground Road and that it’s now a subdivision. I think it’s this neighborhood called Cotswold Terrace, which means they were really right there next to the battleground, possibly even during the Battle of Guilford Courthouse itself in 1781.

Dear Hugo,

This isn’t going to be a letter so much as an extended excerpt of a book I’m reading, but I think that’s allowed since we are on our semi-vacation.

Retyping passages from another author is a writing exercise in itself, teachers have said to me, a way to try on another voice and feeling it coming from your own fingertips. I haven’t done this exercise often, because slipping into another writer’s voice has never been that hard for me. In fact I’ve always been uncomfortable with how easy it is, the same way I pick up spoken slang and intonation without even meaning to (the latest example I’ve noted in my own lexicon is saying “I APPRECIATE YOU!” to someone as an intensifier to the perfunctory thank you. Definitely picked this up on our block. I like it and I’m keeping it.)

It’s not just the voice I am loving so much in , though. It’s the grammar itself. Burns structures her sentences in unruly ways that both capture spoken rhythms and create a constant tension between the collective and the individual. Her grammar is political, in the same way the passive voice (or ) of newspaper headlines is political.

Dear Hugo,

We’re posted up in Raleigh for a little bit. You are having a great time with your indulgent empty-nester grandparents who are happy to play board games and watch cartoons with you and compliment your drawings. Yesterday you and Grandpa got out the RC monster truck and zoomed it all over the back yard, laughing at poor Angus who kept chasing it and barking and then hopping backwards in alarm, confused as to why we weren’t helping him combat the unwholesome robotic threat.

Now that I’m trying to write about Granny’s family, though, every visit home also becomes a research trip.

My mom isn’t the most forthcoming person. The best way I’ve found to get her talking is to ask about a specific object or photograph – Where did you get this old radio? What dog is in this picture? Who collected all these shark teeth, over how many years? So I follow her around like a pestering little kid.

Dear Hugo,

I figured out how to put pictures in this thing.

Dear Hugo,

A couple weeks ago I finally finished writing something I’d been thinking about and researching and (very occasionally) attempting to draft for over a year: this history of rent control efforts in Philadelphia.

I’m mostly happy with how it came out, although if I had more time (and the ruthless editor I always fear/need) it could have been tighter. I DID manage to restrain myself from including the Richard Pryor Incident, though.

Dear Hugo,

people ask how you picked your name.

What happened is, the kitten outside was mewling. It was the end of November and cold. I shook a little dish of our cats’ dry food and lured the kitten and the mom cat onto our porch. They both ate and then the mom cat lay down on her side and the kitten nursed. I looked up the phone numbers for spay-and-neuter clinics. But first I said, we should name them.

You named the kitten Ash, after Ash Ketchum from Pokemon. The kitten was a little black-and-white fuzzball with a crusty eye. I named the mom cat Maxine, which is just a name I like. The mom cat sort of belonged to our neighbor, but I wouldn’t say he owned her. He put out food for her, everyone referred to the sleek black cat as his cat, but she didn’t go inside his house. It was more like they claimed each other. His porch was her territory. There are truly feral cats in our neighborhood, there are housecats, and then there are these in-between, self-domesticated cats who will accept pets and treats and mostly hang out on our block but otherwise do as they please.