Letters
My sister (Nancy, Near Philadelphia) created my blogspot for me more than a week ago, and I immediately came down with a severe case of Bloggers' Block. "What shall I write?" I asked myself a thousand times or so. "Does anybody care what I think -- about anything?"
During this BB period, two different long-time friends came for lunch on two different afternoons and, oddly, the food for thought in both conversations settled into the subject of letters.
By letters, I mean those old-fashioned communiques written on pretty paper known as stationery, scribed in ink, folded in half and placed in a 4" x 5" envelope, sealed, hand-addressed, stamped and dropped into a big blue mailbox.
Jane, my friend who came to lunch on Wednesday, told me about some letters written by her mother more than 60 years ago that surfaced recently when the friend to whom they were sent found them as she was tidying up. She had saved the letters because they spoke of a sweet anticipation that she shared with Jane's mother -- both women were about to deliver their second child. Jane's mother died soon after that second child was born, and her sister Reenie has spent most of her life tortured by the belief that she was an unwanted, unloved child. It's impossible to imagine what these letters meant to her when they were kindly placed in her lap by her mother's dear friend.
Mimi, my friend who came to lunch on Friday, told me she recently had celebrated her "Jubilee," meaning that she has been a Sister of Notre Dame for 50 years. Her only sibling, a brother, was among the guests when her classmates and other members of the Order gathered to honor her. He read from a letter he had rescued from his parents' home in which Mimi's choice to become a nun was described with reverence and joy and -- at the same time -- not a little sadness because their roles and parents had come to an end.
Thinking of my own mother, I remembered the loving caretaker who was with her while she slipped away mentally from Alzheimer's Disease. Lystra was from Trinidad, and she had a special gift with people suffering from dementia. My sister and I grew to love her, admiring the creative ways she kept our mother safe and relatively free from anxiety. When Lystra decided to get her G.E.D., we and her children enjoyed helping her with her homework. I enjoyed helping her to write a "friendly letter" by sending one to her that exemplified the form and content of such a missive.
These days, it is rare for a letter to arrive in the post (though I always look for one amid the supermarket ads, catalogs, charity appeals and bills stuffed in my mailbox). I mourn the near-passing of this old-fashioned form of written conversation. Computers are a marvel; e-mail messages are fun to receive and once in awhile reflect a person's feelings. But they inevitably disappear down the dark hole of Delete, never to be remembered or recovered.
As I begin to count down the months until my 70th birthday, I have resolved to write some from-the-heart letters to those whom I love, in the hopes that they may find their way into a bureau drawer or desk, perhaps one day to resurface at the precise moment when the words need to be savored.
I wonder if you have some old letters tucked away, and what they mean to you today.
During this BB period, two different long-time friends came for lunch on two different afternoons and, oddly, the food for thought in both conversations settled into the subject of letters.
By letters, I mean those old-fashioned communiques written on pretty paper known as stationery, scribed in ink, folded in half and placed in a 4" x 5" envelope, sealed, hand-addressed, stamped and dropped into a big blue mailbox.
Jane, my friend who came to lunch on Wednesday, told me about some letters written by her mother more than 60 years ago that surfaced recently when the friend to whom they were sent found them as she was tidying up. She had saved the letters because they spoke of a sweet anticipation that she shared with Jane's mother -- both women were about to deliver their second child. Jane's mother died soon after that second child was born, and her sister Reenie has spent most of her life tortured by the belief that she was an unwanted, unloved child. It's impossible to imagine what these letters meant to her when they were kindly placed in her lap by her mother's dear friend.
Mimi, my friend who came to lunch on Friday, told me she recently had celebrated her "Jubilee," meaning that she has been a Sister of Notre Dame for 50 years. Her only sibling, a brother, was among the guests when her classmates and other members of the Order gathered to honor her. He read from a letter he had rescued from his parents' home in which Mimi's choice to become a nun was described with reverence and joy and -- at the same time -- not a little sadness because their roles and parents had come to an end.
Thinking of my own mother, I remembered the loving caretaker who was with her while she slipped away mentally from Alzheimer's Disease. Lystra was from Trinidad, and she had a special gift with people suffering from dementia. My sister and I grew to love her, admiring the creative ways she kept our mother safe and relatively free from anxiety. When Lystra decided to get her G.E.D., we and her children enjoyed helping her with her homework. I enjoyed helping her to write a "friendly letter" by sending one to her that exemplified the form and content of such a missive.
These days, it is rare for a letter to arrive in the post (though I always look for one amid the supermarket ads, catalogs, charity appeals and bills stuffed in my mailbox). I mourn the near-passing of this old-fashioned form of written conversation. Computers are a marvel; e-mail messages are fun to receive and once in awhile reflect a person's feelings. But they inevitably disappear down the dark hole of Delete, never to be remembered or recovered.
As I begin to count down the months until my 70th birthday, I have resolved to write some from-the-heart letters to those whom I love, in the hopes that they may find their way into a bureau drawer or desk, perhaps one day to resurface at the precise moment when the words need to be savored.
I wonder if you have some old letters tucked away, and what they mean to you today.
posted by Bonnie at 2:21 PM
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