Dear Americans

Last night I dreamed of you and the times we met...

Mar 18, 2025

Dear people I love,

Dear country I love,

my country,

This one is a little over the top.

Still, I want you to know: I love you all so deeply it’s almost too much for me. I love your sunlight and your expanses, the feel of your air and water and earth, the memory of you unfurling before me, images of the hikes and road trips I’ve had across your magnificence.

The mood I’m in is the fault of sleep: Last night, in my dreams, I was trying to explain this to someone. Now I have to write it all out to you.

I was trying to tell them what it’s really like. I was trying to give them my memories; it felt as serious as life and death.

For some reason, I needed to give them, to give you, my memories from our road trips.

As I was doing so, this sensuality flooded me and all the road trips of my youth and early adulthood (there were at least three) seemed to be slipping away, as if this were hundreds of years ago.

It felt as if someone I’d lost, someone like my grandmother, was here again, and I needed her to understand what was happening. It all depended on that feeling I’d had in transition, watching the country move through me, watching my country as I moved through it. All I wanted to do was keep them there just a little while longer. That was how it felt, why I so longed to express myself. This dream was a story of heartbreak, of the best and the worst of us, told as my memories of those very real road trips, but it was also a movement together towards the complexities of love.

It was as though I were talking to you, America, and myself. In the dream, I wanted to give you the feeling of what it is like to drive through yourself, to see yourself as if you were here, to have so many people help.

What I was trying to say was how it had felt when I was nineteen, twenty, twenty-eight, what it was like to drive for the first time into the Western part of the United States. What I was trying to say was how it felt to come upon those mountains and then those cedars, those forests, that air and smell and sky, and later, that ocean. I remember exactly how it was, moving out from my home coast, across my beloved states and cities, into the pink roads of the Dakotas, then through Montana and Idaho into Washington State, and later, the long snake down through California, and back through the wide South.

Last night, I told you ‘it was like moving into an emerald tree’, but that wasn’t quite right. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t express it. I’d never seen the country change its face over time and space with such beauty and grace, but I just could not say it.

All those stops in random towns, all those unplanned conversations, all those faces, your faces, do you remember me at all? That young woman who you talked with at the diner? Who came into your shop and ended up chatting with you about your husband? I bought that hat you made. You helped me get into a garage when my car was about to overheat. One of you gave me some socks, just because you thought I might need them one day. And I did, as it turned out.

Last night, as we talked, I tried to explain what this was like, and how complicated it was to be in love with you, with all our history, because it is so very terrible, and so very wonderful, too.

But mostly I tried to explain the landscape, the land itself, which includes the people, the trees, the air and the water, the animals, all of us; last night it felt like one satin sheet, but I couldn’t reach it. I was moving through the mysteries of our inseparability. Sometimes, it was magnificent. Sometimes, it was uncomfortable. Sometimes, it was what should never have happened at all. But we had to deal with it.

In my dreams last night, I remembered this. I remembered your soft hands and your wrinkled clothes and your dirty farmer’s hat. I remembered the little flowers on your shirt and the way the sky looked from the motel room and how you showed off something your daughter had made when she was a kid, which seemed to have been long ago. Now I hardly know what to do with this. So I just have to write to you.

Part of the problem might be that I started writing this in the morning, just after the dream. And the dream is strange, because it is of real memories. Another reason is because the way I finally got close to being able to say something to you, to connect as the land, was to start rattling off the names of books. That’s always been my way of communicating. They feel like time capsules and last night, I was so thankful I could open them.

A big part of every road trip for me was always the books. I would go to the library and stock up on everything I could find. One time in particular, I got all the stories they had about ‘the founders’ and the founding aspects of how we met. Lots of audiobooks, too. As I told you last night.

Maybe it is the dream and the waking up from it. Maybe it is that I can remember what it was to be young, to be so in love. Maybe it is because I still am. Because love like that never goes away. Some days you even feel it as strongly as you did in that first moment.

Back then, I was all caught up in this same feeling for you, the one my dream brought back, but I was learning who you were for the first time. I was learning what it meant for you to exist. In some way, it did not seem fair, because there was so much pain everywhere, and yet the point seemed to be to alchemize ourselves into that love, no matter what, that seemed to be the lesson of the books.

You are the place I’ve always held within me, and you are the place I am always making my way through. You are the place I feel when I have the windows down on a country road and I am in the middle of nowhere, and you are the place I still need to be home.

I was in love with you then, and I feel it this morning, too. I am sure I will still feel it on whatever day I take my last breath.

Through so many voices, over so many years, you have told me your feelings, shown me your scars, admitted your vulnerabilities. You’ve also messed everything up, but then you’ve admitted it, and kept trying to do better. It’s all that time, all those years, all those lines that I’ll continue, because they were the right paths to believe in, and that’s why you passed them along to me. That’s why you were kind to me when I came through your town, that’s why you smiled, and that’s why you helped, even though nobody ever saw you do it. The small things are never small at all. Last night, all these memories were just little things, but what could be bigger than this? So I wanted to write to you, while I still feel it.

I also tried to remember the books I was reading on that history-themed trip. The car was full of them. I was on some kind of kick, and I needed to read every single book I could find that was part of our biography. I’m going to share the list below, at least as well as I remember it. It’s faulty of course, but rather than point out the faults, I hope you’ll suggest other books to bridge us.

This all happened so long ago. Who knows if my memory is right, but the feeling certainly is. I haven’t thought this through before sharing it, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s time for me to read some of these stories again, maybe it is time to remember the paths we made and ask what paths we are making now. At least this is what came back to me in the dream, and so I wrote this letter to you, and I made this list.

And now I wonder: What would you add to it?

Love,

Andrea

List of books from my American road trips:

Washington, A Life by Ron Chernow

John Adams by David McCullough

American Sphinx by Joeseph Ellis

The Peabody Sisters by Megan Marshall

Truman by David McCullough

Thomas Jefferson, the Art of Power by John Meacham

American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House by John Meacham

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris