With Affectionate Best Wishes
Inlandia: A Literary Journey/Summer 2023
Papers
After I received the news, I trudged upstairs to retrieve the yellow folder sitting on the shelf in my attic office. I held the folder in my two hands, recognized its solid weight. Labelled Correspondence with Leo Dolenski, the folder held approximately two hundred pieces of uniform loose-leaf covered line-by-line in cursive black ink, a no-frills penmanship as controlled and consistent as the man who wrote it. I flipped through the pages: Dear Maggie, Dear Maggie, Dear Maggie. So many letters, so many years.
The pages are not properly preserved. The ink from the earliest letter, written in 1997, is beginning to fade.
Leo would not have approved.
