Letters, We Get Letters, We Got Lots and Lots of Letters

After finding myself struggling with sniffles, chills and lack of ambition today, I found a stash of memorabilia (for lack of a better word).

Inside this overstuffed and stretched out plastic GAP bag from the 90s were pictures my niece and nephew had drawn, programs from the 1999 Winnipeg Pan Am games, tickets to the Manitoba Theatre Company for "A Streetcar Named Desire", and a stack of random letters I had saved.

Some letters were from my husband. Not too many though. They were mostly cards and he seemed to have a knack of finding a card that said pretty much everything he wanted to say and then he'd sign his name to it, as if to say "Yup, that pretty much sums it up. Let's get on with things, shall we?"

My mom had addressed quite a few to me in my maiden name form to various addresses. Then she learned how to use the computer to type up her letters and didn't know how to use the cursors and backspace keys on the dinosaur machine, so she left the grammatical/spelling errors and subsequently corrected them with Liquid Paper and a ballpoint pen. These were hilarious. She wrote of the neighbours, crazy things that happened to my dad, the mis-adventures of my niece and nephew, as well as a pasted in photo of a mountie, random local newspaper clippings or some craft project.

Then came the stash from a friend of mine that I had saved for 20 years. I can't believe the time passes like that. This friend spent her summers in my home town, visiting her grandparents. We seemed to have a lot of boyfriends that we must have wrote back and forth about and the numerous squabbles that were associated with the boyfriends and other supporting cast members. Looking back, those heartaches were so painful, so real, so stabbing and everlasting. Now, I have trouble remembering who Billy's roommate was, which Jeff we were referring to (was he Billy's roommate?), or why we all spelled our names with an "i" at the end.

I love the part about how I was going into Dentistry and my friend was so amazed that her friend's sister was making $12/hr. Or was it $10/hr? Remember, this was the 80s, Northern Ontario and we really didn't have any trouble thinking about how many cover charges that would clear at the night clubs in the city.

signed, the willow