What sweeter words could a girl ever hope to hear? Especially if that girl aspires to be a writer.
This whole thing started last Sunday as I sat in front of my computer writing my weekly letter/blog. My weekly letter, the one that I print, was becoming too long. Ten pages. That means I have to print both sides of five sheets of paper, fold and then crease them as flat as I can. The Post Office charges more if a letter won’t fit easily through a test slot even if the weight isn’t over! But I’ve done it. I think five pages is the limit before I have to pay more postage.
So, there I sit, on a Sunday afternoon and I’m proofreading this ten page letter that I’ve written when I’m finding things that had to be changed. Missed or misspelled words, a sentence that doesn’t flow right and sometimes even a whole new thought had to be added!
By the time I got through with my story about the ducks in a puddle the rest of the letter had pushed on to page eleven.
So, that was okay. One extra sheet of paper. I don’t mind putting a few pennies with the stamps that my Jersey Boy had bought and sent to me.
“Thank you for the two books of stamps, Mr. B! I love you and miss you!”
“Who’s Mr. B?” you ask.
That could be a story all in and of itself. Sigh.
So there I am, a writer and a story-teller with almost another two full pages to fill. Not a problem. I moved a short story about burial pods onto the rest of page four and I started editing the next story. By the time I finished, the rest of my letter was pushed onto page thirteen.
Thirteen would be printed on the top of the physical page seven. Now I had another blank page and a half.
This is getting ridiculous!
On the phone that Sunday night with an amazing woman whom I’ve had the privilege and honor of being called the daughter of, (can I end a sentence with ‘of’?) I asked, “Momma, what if I changed my weekly letter into something more like a story than a letter?”
“They are stories,” my down-to-earth mother stated and I smiled.
“So my letter isn’t done and I’m too tired to finish it tonight. But I will post a story for you to read tomorrow,” I said.
“Okay,” she said amenably.
“Now, when I print it, do you want it in letter format or story format?” I asked. Although my mother does have a foot in this century and has an iPad, she still prefers to have my letters printed.
She cleared her throat, thinking about it for just a moment before she replied. “Story.”
Settled.
Monday I looked at and made a few changes to my first story including giving it the title Lucky Duck. Then I set about making the next section of my letter into a story.
Doggone it! But it was getting long!
Writing Pods, Hurt Knee and Easter Dinner took the printed letter to page sixteen. That’s eight sheets of paper! And I wasn’t yet done.
“I'm not going to worry about how many pages there are. I'm going to just write until the words stop,” I wrote on my Facebook status. Hours later I get this comment from my beautiful niece Bambi.
“I love your writings!!!” I got three exclamation points! Yay!!!
And I love this photo I took of her and her newborn son four years ago.
But therein lies…lays the problem. I have people who count on receiving a letter in the mail from me every week. I try to have it in the mail by Monday but sometimes it’s Tuesday and this week was marching on.
My beloved Aunt Marie was one of those people. “When your letter arrives in the mail, nothing gets done in this house until it’s read,” she once told me. We were sitting around the kitchen table. Nothing says home like a kitchen table, do you know what I mean? I smile even now as I remember that day. That vision is so clear in my head that I think I must have a photo of it someplace. Aunt Marie, sitting there with her long sleeved red blouse tucked into her tan polyester slacks with an elastic waistband. A white sweater vest covering her shoulders and back. Not everyone can pull off this look but Aunt Marie could. With pride and dignity too.
Aunt Marie had a voice and a laugh I can call up anytime I want and when she laughed her belly shook. I loved that! I used to sit there and try to think of stories just to make her laugh. Is that bad?
Aunt Marie made me feel important. Probably sinfully so. And now memories are all I have of that wonderful woman. Talk about having a hard life - no! We won’t talk about that. But here is the thing that makes me call her and think of her as my ‘beloved’ Aunt Marie. She was happy. Despite what she had been served up in life -and I only know a tiny little bit of that- she wasn’t bitter. When I moved into her world, when I started sending her my letters and stopping to visit her on the way to my mothers in Dushore, Pennsylvania, she was always bright-eyed. A welcoming smile on her beautiful face. And she was polite - always polite. I never showed up, unexpected or otherwise and never not been offered drink and food to eat, no matter what time I walked through her door.
I’d sit at the kitchen table and Aunt Marie would putter around and get out little plates and set them on the counter and get in the fridge and get some sandwich or salad fixens out, chatting the whole time.
And Aunt Marie always ate with me. Even if she had just eaten, she was “… just about to have a cookie with my tea,” and she would politely nibble along with me. We would sit around the heart of the home, a.k.a. the kitchen table, and talk and sip coffee - tea, and talk and eat and talk some more. All too soon it would be time for me to be gitten. Thanks and hugs and kisses were all exchanged and a promise was extracted to stop the next time I was going by~
~Well! That was a pleasant memory for me right smack in the middle of telling you about last weeks letter.
So! Writing Pods, Hurt Knee and Easter Dinner took the printed letter to page sixteen, I wasn’t done and now I had another blank page and a half. Again, not a problem but if history repeats itself, it would be another day until I was done. I decided it was getting too late in the week to edit anymore stories. I had people waiting for their weekly letter! I needed to get it wrapped up, printed and in the mail! It was Wednesday already!
I continued with the story format leaving the rest of the page blank then I printed and mailed the letters. Sixteen pages! Eight two-sided sheets of paper! Twenty-one cents extra postage!
The postal clerk affixed a stamp to the envelope she had just weighed and handed the rest to me as she rang up my receipt.
“Boy, a stamp collector is really going to like getting that extra stamp on there,” a man standing close by commented.
“Yeah?” I wanted to acknowledge him.
“Yeah!”
And that brings you up to this week which is starting with a five page deficit. Last week, after I posted the stories, I was left with a page of newsy news. So let’s get on with it, shall we...
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