In the Archives with Courtney Block | The Signal

The first day in the archives... that I discovered the letters.

And I'm sitting there and I open the file folder that's, you know, I think is titled something like letters to Margaret Anderson.

You know, that's all it says.

And so I open it and I start reading it.

There are these hand, some of them are handwritten, most of them are typewritten.

And I'm reading them and I'm like, I'm like halfway through one letter and I'm like, oh my God, these are love letters.

And there's like 70 plus pages of them.

And I remember what that feeling was like in the research room.

I was just like,

how do I possibly just sit here completely normal and like quiet and like not disrupt all these other researchers? And I just want to be like, oh my God, you guys have to listen to this.

I'm sure all the other researchers were thinking that too about their own, you know, topics or whatnot.

But that was a strange feeling to like be in the

research room and have to sort of contain, like feel like you have to contain yourself.

So I made scans of everything, of course.

And that night...

Towards the end of the trip, I was in my hotel room and there, that September, there had been a hurricane off the coast of North Carolina that I think had maybe downgraded itself into a tropical storm.

and it had come inland because Durham's only about like what two and a half ish hours from the coast there and so there was this intense storm that that was hitting Durham at the end of my trip and I remember coming back to the hotel and i was going through the scans and just like reading them um and just sort of looking at all all the other things as well that i had found or whatever and um all the power goes out in the hotel it was clear to me that it was gonna be out for a while the storm was pretty bad but it wasn't so bad that you couldn't, you know, go across the street.

So I got in my rental car and I was like, well, I'm just going to go across the street, find a place to have dinner because, you know, they have power over there and I'm just going to chill out there for however long and maybe the power will come back on.

I don't know.

So I go across the street to get some dinner and I get a bottle of wine and I'm sitting there at the hotel and, you know, just killing some time or whatever and I decide to go back to the hotel and they, you know, recork the bottle of wine for me.

And I just like take it back to the hotel with me.

And I'm like, well, I don't if the

power is not on, I'm just going to have the rest of this bottle of wine and enjoy myself and whatever.

Who cares? So I go back to the hotel.

The power is still out.