My great-grandma Lee used to send me letters on stationery that looked like the paper incarnation of an antique china cabinet. Our penpalship began when I responded to a happy-tenth-birthday card with a thank-you note. A few days later a thank-you-for-your-thank-you note sat in the mailbox. Birds enwreathed in gold foil flitted alongside an elaborate cursive that could not be much younger than the 83 years between us. It was so illegible that I asked my dad to decipher it for me. But the more thank-you-for-your-thank-you-for-your-thank-you notes, the more the foreign flourishes faded into the ephemera. I could read her letters any day. Even when the handwriting became shakier and the mail scarcer. Even when they stopped coming.

Caelan Bailey is a junior studying English and History from Charleston, SC. While in New York, she enjoys making biscuits and thinking through what it means to be from the South.