The Story Behind Letters from Lunenburg

The morning my Nan died, I woke up knowing something was wrong before anyone told me.

I was nineteen, maybe twenty. We had emigrated to Canada a couple of years before. Growing up, my brothers and I spent summers at her caravan by the sea. She loved bingo. She knitted. The last I can picture clearly, she was knitting clown dolls with yarn hair. She made us ham, egg and chips. She made us milky coffee in glass cups. Every Christmas, the whole family came together at her house. She was the one who held us together.

When we left, she would slip us money. Pocket money, arcade money, more than we'd expected, maybe more than she could easily afford. We stopped fighting her about it because she never took it back. That was her way.

I knew her. But only the way a child knows a grandmother: the rituals, the warmth, the certainty that she loved us. Not deeply. Not the way you can when you're old enough to ask the right questions. She was taken before I got there.

Not long after, I started dating the woman who would become my wife. Her grandmother was still alive.

She had lived through the Depression, and it showed. Not as a complaint. As behaviour. There were always zucchini loaves in the freezer, wrapped in wax paper and sealed with an elastic band. When we visited, she'd send us home with one. Usually two. If two people came for dinner, she cooked for eleven. Her husband and her son were fishermen. She had been a cook in the army during the war. None of this was offered as biography. It was just who she was.

She was rough and plain-spoken, with a sense of humour that went out of its way to be the wrong kind. Then she'd watch your face to see how you'd react to it. She told you to take your hat off at the table. She said what she thought. Underneath all of it was a particular kind of kindness.

One evening, we were at a restaurant: my girlfriend, her family, and her grandmother. Something happened. I'm not entirely sure what set it off. Maybe it was watching how the older woman moved through the world, or the way she growled at me about my hat, or just some quality of the moment. Right there, unexpectedly and completely, I found myself crying for my own Nan. The one in England, the one I never really knew.

Grief is strange that way. It sneaks up on you.

Hattie Zwicker is not my grandmother. She is not my wife's grandmother either. She is a character: a fictional woman who lives in a dark red house on a hill in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, with a view of the harbour and a cat named Smoke.

But she exists because those women existed.

I built Letters from Lunenburg for people who have their own version of this. Who sat across from someone older and wish they'd asked more questions. Who lost someone before they were old enough to know what they were losing. Who miss a voice they can't quite describe: older, plainer, already through the hard things, not asking anything back.

Hattie is that voice.

Once a month, she writes a letter. A real one, on paper, in an envelope, with a stamp. She's just living her life in Lunenburg and telling you about it the way someone would if they'd known you a long time and didn't see any reason to perform.

She isn't asking anything of you. She just writes.

Some people collect things. Some people have rituals. This is for the people who still believe there's something in a letter that doesn't survive the screen.