Recently, a cousin in Ireland sent me a letter I’d written to my grandparents when I was fifteen. She’d found it in an old box of my grandmother’s. To see the letter surface now, almost five decades later, surprised and touched me deeply.

Some of my happiest childhood memories are made of moments visiting my grandparents in Ireland. Time there was near bliss with its soda bread and jam for breakfast, the tangle of hedgerows, the stone wall out front where I’d hidden the tiny bones and feathers of a yellow bird, the bog where I’d lie on my stomach and smell the animal and salt of it. I loved too, the impromptu melodies and storytelling in the pub on Sundays—how some of the stories broke the room into laughter, and others turned the air silent and thick as Mass.

I pictured my grandmother, Bridget, reading the letter aloud to my grandad, Jack, the two of them solemn in front of the fireplace, his blue eyes staring into the flames while he listened and poked the turf. I wondered what they’d said later about the meanderings and speculations of their American teenage granddaughter hiding behind her curlicue letters and exclamation marks, or if they’d said anything at all.

I imagine they might have sat for a long while as they often did, and then my grandmother had folded the letter back up, returned it to the envelope and said to him, “Will I get your tea now?” and on her way to the stove, she’d put the letter in the china cabinet, behind the fancy tea cups and whiskey she’d reserved for priests and other special guests.