Homer Jarrett
131 Puryear St. City
2730 Kenwood Ave.
Indianapolis, Indiana
Nov. 28, 1905
Mr. Jarrett,
Dear Homer, You are most cordially invited to take Thanksgiving dinner with us at our home Thurs. Nov. 30th. It will be very informal.
Yours sincerely
Anna Reed
P.S. I neglected to tell you that dinner will be served at “7:00 P.M.”
Anna Reed
_______________
The invitation was sent only two days beforehand! Perhaps they had invited him earlier, informally, or maybe it was a standing invitation?
I missed your introduction to these letters, Kristin, and will have to go back and learn what the nature of the relationship was between your grandmother and Homer. The tone is quite intimate, but there also seems to be an undercurrent of exasperation, at least at times. In those days, could a man and a woman correspond like this without there being assumed to be some kind of “understanding” between them?
Forgive me if you have already explained all this. I will go back and check eventually. In the meantime I will miss these letters.
Perhaps it’s time for me to start re-reading the sheaf of letters from my mother to my uncle that my cousin gave me last year, after both had died within five months of each other. But in this case because so many of the people to whom they refer in the letters are still alive, I don’t think I could–or at least should–do it without asking for permission from various family members.
I don’t see evidence of any “understanding” between them, except for the way she signs her letters sometimes. I do see lots of exasperation.
A few letters before the formal invitation, Pearl did say her mother was getting the house ready for him to come out for Thanksgiving.
I don’t know the conventions of writing between men and women. I have read old books where it was not approved unless there was an “understanding” and others where the young people wrote each other freely because they were old friends. Homer and Pearl did have a family connection with her sister and his cousin being married, and he seemed to know the whole family, more or less.
I think I will put up a list of the letters and links to the whole batch.
I agree….seems like Pearl expressed a lot of frustration with Homer, instead of affection. Seems like she was was always wanting more from his letters, in a sense ( more information about his life, involvement in the church, what the place he was living was like, etc ).
And whenever she quoted his letters, he exasperated me!