By |

Anita my love, put a smile on that face.
Your moon is handsome and frilly all the day long and so very shimmery in the night.
As the stars begin to weep for the strength of your heart, you will play the chords of all of their hearts and make tears flow from their eyes.

 

You will speak more than one language and you will stand and speak, bravely, and say unto yourself, “I love you. You are my rock. You are the wavelength upon which all the universe is spoken and heard, whispered and forgotten. You are everyone, everyone is with you.”

 

Smile now and skip away, in a giggle that beckons your soul to laugh out loud.

462_croped_full_color_zaloos_logo
(image from Zaloo’s Canoes in West Jefferson, NC)

 

By |

Email:
Good Grief Girl, hope you take a vitamin supplement array…sounds like you and your boyfriend live life on your own terms…as we all should.
Sam Ervin the fourth, or something like that—and Tillis
I look forward to a possible January reunion…
Let’s keep in touch, we seem to be “well met…”   Sincerely, J
P.S.
I am so proud of your grad school efforts; tomorrow looks like academics will rule the roost…life is so complex, compared to what looks, looking back, like a simpler time long gone.
________________________________________________

Email:

Funny enough Joe, I have been taking my vitamins and I actively and daily recognize the privilege in my life to make the choices I make to be a little bit freer than some.  Yesterday, I was delighted to hear from you. I wrote about it in my journal this morning.  It filled me with joy to remember our first encounter and I wrote a recount of it.

​Life is seemingly more complex even than when I was coming up as a little girl in Alamance County.  I realized just yesterday how much I longed for a telephone you couldn’t walk around with.  How a stationary place to talk on the phone allowed for, or rather dictated, that one must pay attention to the person speaking on the other end.  How precious a thought in these mind-blowingly, fast-paced times when I truly believe people do not take the time to merely look one another in the eye, much less pay attention to the words they are bravely saying out loud.
 
You and I are brave creatures.  Boldly stepping out into the world and speaking.  Greeting everyone we meet.  Honoring the lives of the workers in places; we are the ghosts, I believe, of human past.  Is that too nostalgic of me?  I read in Woebegon Boy by Garrison Kiellor that nostalgia is for the birds.  Here is the beautiful paragraph about his mother, “Being Lutheran, Mother believed that self-pity is a deadly sin and so is nostalgia, and she had no time for either.  She had set at the beside of her beloved sister, Dotty, dying of scarlet fever in the summer of 1934; she held Dotty’s hand as the sky turned dark from their father’s fields blowing away in the drought, she cleaned Dotty, wiped her, told her stories, changed the sheets, and out of that nightmare summer she emerged stronger, confident that life would be wondrous, or at least bearable.”
 
What are you doing for Christmas?  
 
Cheers to a brave soul,
 
Anita​
f57b7a4c1ead74c51b8b54f93b4eb655
The Stationary Telephone                                                  photo from: whimsydecor.blogspot.com