Evolution

          I've been looking forward to 2018.

          "Why's that?" you ask.

          2018 marks a huge milestone in my life.

          Oh my gosh! Twenty years! I've been writing weekly letters about my everyday life and now I have twenty notebooks just chock full of memories!

          How about if we start this first letter of my twenty-first year with letter facts?

          I wrote 53 letter blogs last year. 554 printed pages, with 141,730 words, and 1,695 pictures.

          "Peg, you never gave us word count or picture count before," you observe.

          I know, right! Last year I changed the program I use to write with and Microsoft Word keeps track of word count right on the screen where I can see it all the time. How many words do I write in a year? I wondered. Would it be novel length?

          Now that we are at the end of the year I can tell you that yes, I wrote you a novel last year. Publishers print between 250-300 words per page so my novel would contain 473 pages! I shudder to think how long that would be if the pictures were added!

          Many times over the years, Mike has asked me when this happened or when that happened. "I don't know," I always tell him. "I'd have to go back through my letters to find out." But I never do. Not until this year — last year. I got to wondering about when certain events in my life happened and I decided to find out. I went out into my library and brought in a stack of notebooks. I opened them up and started reading a few stories. Then I went back out and got more notebooks. Then I went back out and got even more notebooks! I ended up bringing in the first thirteen years. I stacked eight of them under my desk and the rest I stood on the floor beside my desk. 

          Over the course of a couple of weeks, I'd flip through all of the notebooks with the intention of trying to answer my questions and boy! You should have seen the silverfish and spiders run! Now that the notebooks were inside where it's warm, the bugs 'came awake'.

          "Peg, I know what spiders are, but what are silverfish?" you wonder.

          Silverfish are small, wingless insects that like damp and paper. Actually, they eat carbohydrates such as sugar or starches. They're in my library because they eat the glue from bookbinding's and even the pages themselves!

          "Tell me more about silverfish!" you say?

          Yeah, I bet you're saying that. But let me tell you a couple of things anyway. Silverfish get their name because of their color and appearance. They have an interesting ritual for reproduction. First the male and female stand face to face, their quivering antennae touching, then repeatedly back off and return to this position. In the next phase, the male and female stand side-by-side and head-to-tail, with the male vibrating his tail against the female. Finally, the male lays a spermatophore (a sperm capsule covered in gossamer) which the female takes into her body via her ovipositor (a special organ) to fertilize her eggs. She'll lay groups of eggs, fewer than 60 at once, and usually less than 100 in her lifetime.

          "Oh Peg! TMI! TMI!" you say. (TMI stands for 'too much information')

          Well, just let me tell you one more thing then I'll move on.

          Silverfish have been around for a long, long, time! The predecessors of the silverfish are considered one of the earliest and most primitive insects.

          "Wait, Peg. I have question for you," says you.

          Okay, go ahead.

          "Doesn't the cold kill the silverfish?"

          Great question! Cold slows them down — a lot! But it has be freezing to kill them and I don't know if my library gets that cold.

          Silverfish and spiders squashed with a tissue and thrown into the trash, I flipped through my notebooks.

          Mike sold the business in Indiana and moved to Missouri in late 1997. I finished my tenth year at the factory I was working in and followed in January of 1998. I went from working 40 plus hours a week as a machine setup and operator (a job I loved) to being a stay-at-home homemaker. I was bored. I got my first home computer in February of that year and that's when my letter writing took off. I'd already been writing weekly letters to my kids who were living with their dad in another state. A computer, with spell check, clip art, and different fonts, made writing a lot more fun. Plus it had an added bonus of being able to save what I'd written. I don't guess I'd been writing very long before I actually started printing and keeping copies of the letters I'd written just as a protection against a computer crash. But those aren't the only reasons I started writing letters. There's another reason too and one that involves regret.

          My father died a couple of years before and as I got into writing, I thought about how much he would have loved getting a letter from me once in a while. My mother, whom I affectionately call Momma, was diagnosed with emphysema and ultimately COPD. I didn't want to have the same regret all over again so I started sending her letters. I can't even say it was a weekly letter (although ultimately that's what it's become) because there were weeks I'd write her two or three times.

          That first year, I wrote individual letters. Sometimes copying and pasting pieces from other letters, but individualized just the same. Sometime over the next year I included other family members and that's when I went to a form-style letter.

          For the first couple of years I didn't have internet so I was printing and mailing quite a few letters every week and that was creating an expense of paper, printer ink, and postage. To compensate for the paper and printer ink, I printed my letters in an annoying little thumbnail format. That was fine when my eyes were young and healthy but now that I'm old and have cataracts I need a magnifying glass to read them. It would be easier if I scan all of my old letters into the computer but that seems like a daunting task, one I'll probably undertake some day.

          The postage debt didn't start to ease until email became the preferred method of communication. Actually, many of you had it long before I did.

          "Just get email!" one of my beautiful sisters would beg me — and you know which one you are — "Then you'll hear from us all the time!"

          I balked. I was afraid of the internet. I know it's silly now but then? Even then there were horror stories of all the bad things that were on the internet. But Mike got the internet first and even though surfing the web was pretty cool, the web pages loading was as slow as molasses in February! Do you remember those days?

          And I fell in love with email.

          But my sister was wrong. I still didn't hear from you very often.

          "We're just shits," was her response. I suspect y'all were just way busier than I was, but I didn't understand why you couldn't — wouldn't take a few minutes to write me a few lines at least once in a while!

          "Don't they know how hard a work it is?" I cried on my Momma's shoulder over the phone one day.

          "I guess not, but I LOVE your letters," she'd console me.

          I'd decided right then and there that I would always write my mother a weekly letter but the rest of you? I needed a little something from you. "If I don't hear from you once in a while I'm going to cut you off!" I'd threaten.

          Today, I laugh about it. "I wonder how long it was before I stopped threatening y'all?" I asked my cute little red-haired sister in a phone conversation the other day. I really expected her to say, "I don't know," but she didn't.

          "Seven or eight years," was her quick reply and I laughed.

          So, besides using the annoying thumbnail format, I was also using clip art to decorate my pages. It wasn't until mid 1999 that my sister sent me a letter with pictures — real pictures in them!

          "How did you do that!" I asked her.

          "With a scanner," was her answer.

          It would be another two years until I got a scanner of my own and the first real picture I find in the annals of history, is my late cousin Jessica in her wedding gown and man-oh-man! Was she ever beautiful!

          I see, as I read the last page of my letter from July 14, 200l, that I wondered about a billboard I'd seen. A friend to the world is no friend of God. I wondered what it meant. I loved the world and I loved God. I loved the mountains and oceans and trees and birds and flowers and even the bugs! How does that make me an enemy of God? Now I know this is from James 4:4 and James isn't talking about the things God created. He's talking about the morals, the lifestyles, the ethics of our civilization. For example, society may say it's okay to live together without marriage, but God doesn't. And that's why, after being together for 21 years, Mike and I got married.

          That year, 2001, was when I started taking pictures and using them in my letters, but I continued to mix clip art in for several more years after that.

          Technology was moving fast in those days and pretty soon digital cameras came out. That made things even easier for me because I didn't have to wait for pictures to come back from the developer and I could skip the scanner altogether. That's when I discovered a love of photography. At first, I'd just show you the pictures I was taking. It wasn't until later that I'd identify flowers and bugs for you.

          My life is an open book. I wrote about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

          And some of the things I'd written about I'd just as soon never have remembered; they made me sad. But there are funny stories too. "Mike, do you remember when the squirrel got in the house when we lived on Bittersweet Road?" I asked.

          "Uh-uh."

          I read the story to him and we laughed the whole way through.

          My letters have evolved over the years, just as anything would if you did it long enough.

          Someone else who joined the computer age shortly after I did was my mother. I believe her first computer came from me and Mike. "You don't have to get online," I told her when she expressed the same fears as I had, "You can just play Solitare on it."

          Along with digital Solitare, she'd discovered other games like Spider, Pyramid, and Golf. Oh, and Mahjong, a game which we both quickly became addicted to. And then Momma got a printer and started making movie posters for movie night at the Sullivan Terrace, the retirement community where she lived. From there she progressed to writing! Can you believe it! It's the best thing that's ever happened to her!

          Okay, okay! I hear you! It may not be the best thing that's ever happened to her but it certainly was a boon to the rest of us as she started to write stories about her childhood. In my year 2000 notebook I found sixteen stories she'd written.

  

          Long about 2013 my mother started to get serious about writing her life story. After Momma moved to Arizona back in 2015, she finished writting it and my oldest sister Patti had it made into a book. Whether these stories made it into her book or not, I don't know — I don't remember. I did read her book — a chapter at a time, over the course of the years it took her to write it.

          But I'll tell you this. I am eternally thankful that she wrote her life story and memories down. It's something I wish I'd had from my grandmother or great grandmother.

          And with that, let's call this one done!