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Have you noticed people seldom write letters anymore. It's the age of text messaging, e-mails and phone calls. No more letters that can be read and re-read and folded gently to be placed in a box to be enjoyed again at a later date.
Cards are like that, too. With all the electronics we are priviledged to own, a trip to Hallmark just seems too much trouble. We just click, choose, click in some added words and hit the "send" button. So easy. Yep, I'm guilty of doing just that. I'm not against it at all, just remembering the feeling of opening up the mail box and getting a letter or card from someone who took time to actually pen words on paper, place a stamp on the envelope and send it on my way.
I have letters that were written long ago from a lonely Air Force photographer when he was half a world away in a not so popular place called Viet Nam. What a treasure those pages are now. I haven't read them in a long time and I didn't keep every one. Just some that I knew would need to be enjoyed in the years to come when he was home and I could look across the room and see his face instead of looking in my heart and remembering his smile. I don't need to read them now, but if ever I do...they are waiting for me.
I am getting letters now. They are written from a jail cell not so many miles away. They are from someone I love dearly and am having to support daily with thoughts and prayers. He calls me and I visit on designated days for a quick 15 minute period.
But...he writes me letters! Some of them are funny as he recounts some tale of cell block antics. Some are filled with uncertainty of what will come in the days, weeks, months or years ahead. All of them end with the words, "I love you". That is what makes them so special.
I got one this week and he had drawn some flowers across the top of the blue lined, white papered legal pad. Each flower was a different color. There was a little bee fluttering above one flower as a sun with a smiley face beamed down. Nothing special, you say??? Oh how wrong. In jail you cannot have crayons, paints, colored pencils, etc. How did he manage to make such a lovely border with limited supplies? He calls it "M & M Art". He gets M & M's and dampens the shell and dabs the color onto the page. How time consuming, how patient he must be...how sweet that he thinks of doing things like that.
Even in a jail cell the human spirit goes on! He is reading a lot of books and shares some thoughts with me when he reads something that he knows will touch my heart or make me smile or cause me to think.
We tell jokes and laugh and try to keep a positive attitude while waiting on...the unknown.
Let me share a though with you that he sent last week. It made me stop and think. Then I realized that whatever I have gone through in the past and whatever I will face in the future...I will survive and be stronger.
"The greatest loss in life is not death. It's what dies inside while you are alive."
Mz Scarlett...ya don't even have to lick stamps anymore, they are adhesive!
Laurie
