Seven Years

Anne writes: Today we walked all the way around Good Sam! Stopping at every bench along the way, but not for long. Not an undertaking for the hurried, but surprisingly doable. I think both of us were surprised. The delicious fall weather of course lured us on. This was after another morning spent much of the time lying in bed, and repeated comments, “I just don´t know why I don´t have any steam.”

After our walk, we had coffee and cookies in the dining room looking out the window at the corn fields ready to be harvested and I fetched a plastic bag full of cards I was curious about that I had found in the closet. They turned out to be all Christmas and birthday cards from 2008. As I went through them and read some names and some of the messages, I suggested maybe they could be disposed of, but ended up agreeing with Mom that “maybe we should keep them”.

My favorite was actually an envelope stamped “Return to Sender” – a Christmas letter written by Mom, dated January 2009, that never made it to Bea Abraham. After all the family news (it was an especially wonderful Christmas because Scott had “completed his army enlistment”), Mom wrote “And now our thoughts turn to the inauguration of our first Black president and, of course, improvement to the serious problems our country faces.” Yes, a lot has happened in seven years.