Darling Sylvia,
“Deliver the letter, the sooner the better.” In a time long ago, in a northern Michigan town called Grayling, a twenty-year-old Eddie Bert was driving home after work from a summer job with the USGS. The point was to get to the mailbox before his dragon lady mother (Ruth Elizabeth) snagged the letter from you. Your letters were special. They looked different, felt different, and smelled wonderfully like you.
It was a far away and ancient time when phones were rotary, postage was six cents, and Bill Gates had not yet been potty trained. The first had come on June 12, 1967. It was the summer between our sophomore and junior year at Alma College. You were two hundred and seventy-eight miles away in Grosse Pointe Park and I was exiled in the northwoods of Crawford County. I snatched the letter from Mom’s grasp and went to my den to treasure it.
I read your letter and then responded. The letter meant everything. We were an item. I wrote and received twice and sometime three times a week that and the following summer. I found the box containing both your letters and mine last week in the closet. I really did not remember that you saved them. Fifty-five years of loving you, documented in a Rapallo shoebox. Years ago in an old trunk I discovered Dad’s 1936 letters to Mom. He was in the northwoods of Michigan at Fife Lake CCC Camp, and she was in Mars Hill, Maine.
Writing a love letter is an ancient art form. It takes a lot more thought than a tweet or a text. It starts with chit-chat; I am on the porch, the sun is shining, and I was dreaming of you. After the introduction, I proceeded to hopes and dreams (what are my values things). The third paragraph was filled with the scary things called feelings. You were teaching me that I actually did have feelings. The fourth paragraph got mushy; How much I wanted to hold you in my arms at that moment and show my love to you.
Last week, I sat down to revive the art and wrote you seven days in a row. Because postage is fifty-five cents for one ounce first class, I left them at your breakfast plate. I loved you then and love you even more fifty-five years later.
Love – Eddie Bert