#438 Old Letters

While I am cleaning out the paper in the den, I am finding a lot of old correspondence.  It's amazing to revisit my mind from years back.  I'm afraid that's something that today's youth will miss.  With all their correspondence being of the ephemeral variety (online, phone), they will have less opportunity to revisit their younger mind.

Anyway, it has slowed down the house clearing project considerably.

I am finding many letters and (paper) journal entries I had written to and about Jay back in the beginning, when we first realized how things were between us, but we didn't know what to do about it.  I am amazed that many of the same things I felt then, I am feeling again now.  But I'm much calmer about it now.  I guess because there's no "baby lust" now.  No "tick, tick" of the hormonal clock.

I found very upbeat and positive letters from my youngest sister, written two years before she drank herself to death.

I am also finding letters I had written to friends and Jay's sisters when we were fighting his cancer.  Now, I can't believe what we went through.  Really rough.  One of the letters was the infamous "Christmas letter" of 2000.  Jay's entire extended family is really big on the "our year" letters, where you brag about the wonderful year your family has had.  I dislike the whole concept.  If you can't keep in touch during the year, what makes you think people want all that information at the end of the year.  But, as a member of the family, I had to meet expectations.  (Although I flatly refused to send those silly photo postcards.)

I had missed writing the 1999 letter because the tumor had reoccurred, right before Jay was supposed to get the bone marrow transplant, and the whole treatment plan was changed, there was another craniotomy, daily radiation, and so on, and everything was just too frantic.  I didn't even get cards out in 1999, let alone a letter.  So the 2000 letter covered two years of brain cancer battle.  I mean, how could it not?  That's ALL we'd done for two years. 

I will never forget (or forgive) a subsequent telephone call from one of his sisters.  Her comment on the letter was "Merry Christmas" in a very bitter tone, "way to throw a wet towel on everybody's holiday."  Gee.  Sorry about that.

So I'm reading and keeping instead of simply  sorting and pitching.  A temporary hitch in the git-along.

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BTW - Piper called early this afternoon, and I answered the phone in the kitchen.  I needed to get some information from the den for him, so I set the kitchen phone down, and picked up in the den.  We talked for long enough that I forgot that the kitchen phone was off the hook.  So if anyone tried to call me today, that's why you couldn't get me.  Sorry.

~~Silk