Hard Copies

I finally had the time to go through boxes in an effort to rid our house of things that I deemed were unworthy of storage space when I came across a stack of cards and letters that my husband had kept and lugged from one duty station to the next. He had kept each and every single piece of correspondence I had sent him when we first met. My book project was born.

I knew that the letters he sent me were lying around somewhere but I thought that I had left them in Cebu for safekeeping when I moved to Guam to start our married life together. His nose was out of joint until I told him that if I found them (since his letters were considerably longer than the ones I sent him), that it was his task to write volume two. I was on page 54 and had already invested a couple of weeks on the draft when I found the stack in the back of the linen closet. I had already even shared a few of those pages with those who were there "in the beginning" of our love story.

I can't help myself, the story would not be complete without including his letters and so I am back to page one. It is slow progress; my first task was to put them all in chronological order. There are more than a hundred letters that need to be transcribed, probably another hundred cards that need to be scanned, which encompassed the almost two years we had a long-distance relationship.

Then I started reading. I am glad we kept those letters. I have proof that we were once madly in love. Any couple who has been married for more than a decade knows that while love matures into a deeper level, it is good to be reminded of how it once felt when everything was new. While I sometimes make gagging sounds when reading some of them, it is nice to reminisce and marvel at how far we have come.

In this day and age of e-mail, instant messaging, low long-distance rates, and Skype, our use of snail mail back then seems so archaic; however, they served a purpose of bringing to life a story that I can hand down to my son. May he not gag on it :-)