"Wispy clouds coming in like angel wings.
I bet we get rain in the night, which is just fine. Hope we get lots of snow this winter."
Gotta Love Lois!
My mom's cousin lives in an old metal-sided trailer in the desert, a few hours north of her favorite place on earth, the Grand Canyon. She raised five children who rarely visit her, but being a widow seems to suit her better than being a wife. Lois likes to be left alone, but she also loves to hear from far-flung friends and relatives. Before going blind last fall, she would write dozens of letters by hand, every week, to assorted penpals.
Losing those weekly letters hit me a lot harder than I ever imagined possible.
I confess, it sometimes felt like a chore to write her back with a letter or two a week, in this day and age of internet. Over the years, my penmanship has become as ghastly and illegible and hers, but we last-century letter writers are like the Enigma Code to our offspring. Lois has an adult son living with her, older than I am, but he will read letters to her only if they are printed or typed. No patience for that chicken scratching all these old women do. Now, I would gladly hand-write three letters a week to Lois, if only she still had the sight and good health to read them herself.
"Wispy clouds coming in like angel wings"
was one of my favorites.
October 23 - 2016
Hi Carol!
It is a sort of gusty cooling down, threat of rain by tonight, Sunday.
How is it there? I'm on my porch. Hummingbirds trying get nectar out of the bottle. They are feisty little critters aren't they!
I hear the Loud Speaker from the arena over a ways from here! I used to take Laura* (Lois's only daughter) and Sheba, her Palomino horse, to the gymchonas when she was young... I trained her to run barrels and ple bending. She was a wonderful horse. Laura was a good rider. Had an old truck and an old trailer and away we went! And now I'm old as the hills and very seldom go anywhere!
sourceAnd I've been sneaking Halloween candy.
I need to stop it my diabetes isn't going to tolerate it much longer, although I've been taking my blood sugar twice a day and it doesn't seem to make much difference!
Almost every letter after she turned 80 included confessions like that one. Lois and her sugar! Her Aunt Joanne, confronted at the dinner table for indulging in dessert despite her diabetes, famously shrugged and said, "Well, we've got to die of something," and reached for seconds.
That aunt lived to be nearly a hundred, as I recall. And the older these women in the family would get, the more assertive they became. In the same October letter, Lois wrote,
Someone asked me if I had an empty room so a teenage mother, her baby and her boyfriend could come here to live.
And I said NO! I'm too old.
Hopefully that's it!!
Have a beautiful day
and I'll talk to you later on down that long dusty road.
Lots of love,
Lois
There's a Phoenix Cardinal football game on tonight.
So I'll be glad when that comes on at 5:30 p.m.
It's devastating when they lose.
"I'll talk to you later on down that long dusty road."
That was her favorite closing line, one that is now a part of me, internalized and treasured.
source
Time for me to pick up the phone and give her a call. Her voice is as bright and cheerful as ever, in spite of that Thanksgiving Day scare when told me she's dying, and ready to go, and I believed her. The reality of losing Lois had me so rattled, all I could do was write a short story, Ashes and Acorns, inspired by her wish to be cremated and scattered over the Grand Canyon.
No matter how eccentric or blunt and opinionated the old women in your life may be, they mean more to you than you may know. Sometimes, for the unwise, it is only in losing them that we realize how much they matter to us.
I was granted a reprieve, a second chance, and now I only wish the "chore" of writing back still came at me three times a week. Lois has taught me so many things, and someday, the wisdom and lilting, lyrical voice of a recluse in the desert will have to come to life in my fiction.
And if nobody reads it but me, that's all right. Someone else, later on down that long dusty road, might find Lois in my fiction and treasure her as I do.
A Little Valentine's Day Miracle: Letters from a Recluse in the Desert, Part One
@carolkean/5ygy2e-a-little-valentine-s-day-miracle-letters-from-a-recluse-in-the-desert-part-two
art and flair courtesy of @PegasusPhysics
