A Lifetime of Letters

Today is the 7th Anniversary of my mother's passing, hard to believe.

I left home when I married at 18 and began living overseas at 20, when Ex-Man #1 and I were stationed in Germany. Telephone calls were difficult to make, not to mention expensive. We'd go to the Army Post Office, where there was a row of about 8 phone booths with unfamiliar German-style phones. Calls were placed Collect and limited to holidays and really special occasions. Sometimes there was quite a line so calls were brief, but Mom and Dad were always happy to hear my voice.

So, like many of us at the time, we wrote letters. Soldiers anticipated Mail Call like people today wait for...well, people rarely wait for anything, you'll have to fill in your own blank.  But it was always exciting to receive mail from home.

Hubby would hand over Mom's thick letter and I'd tear open the envelope, wanting to read about the 'normal life' I'd left behind.  In turn I'd tell her about life as a military wife, traveling around Europe, my ups, my downs.

[Dad wrote letters, too, mostly about woodworking projects (I'd spend hours with him in the garage) and his latest electronic discovery.]

Mom was a prodigious letter-writer, much more than me.  Later in life, after Dad died,  her letters got longer and she'd use legal pads, page after page, front and back, carefully numbered (16 was not unusual); and when I lived in Holland for a year in the '90's, she numbered her letters, too, as she vowed to write once a week (below).

I learned of her gardening; babysitting a neighbor's children, which she loved; volunteering during election registration; visiting 'her little store,' a thrift shop a couple blocks away, where she uncovered treasures like I do in Goodwill.  Mundane things which were sometimes tedious to read (by the 9th or 10th page).

But she also included anecdotes, photographs, tips on how to eat properly (which I never took to heart), loads of encouragement plus gentle reminders: to be a good person; to pay yourself first; and "Put your hand in God's."  She wrote of her own trials and tribulations and how she handled them, which unconsciously sunk in, at least some things.

When I went back to 'Jersey in 2013 and went through Mom's house (she was in the early stages of dementia), I found that she had kept EVERY letter I wrote to her.  Boxes and boxes of them, with all my different last names, it was kind of embarassing to look at.  In my belongings packed safely away in her attic, I kept her letters to me.

I started sifting through them, many without stamps (cut away for my collector-nephew), amazed at the volume; but it was impossible - I couldn't keep them all.  Besides not having the space, I didn't really want to re-live my failed marriages and the circumstances leading up-to.

So I grabbed some of every name, place and time period I could find, put them in a plastic folder and brought them back to Oregon.  The remaining paper was hand-shredded and returned to the Earth, that was hard.   Despite good intentions, I still haven't gone through them all; you have to be in the right mood, you can imagine.

But I'm so grateful that I still have such personal memories of my mother, and can hold and re-read them at my leisure.  I know this - every time I DO read one, I always find a golden nugget which I didn't appreciate at the time.

Mom always said, "Even if you only get one thing out of a book, it's worth it."  Same with letters.  Her last one to me, written with shaky hand, still expressed such love.  What greater gift can I have?

P.S.  For more, read I Remember Mama.