Our Love Story…
Love you can touch, feel, connect to… and return to again and again…
I grew up writing letters.
It started as a way to connect with my grandparents and great-grandparents since we always lived far from my parents’ hometowns. I always loved receiving their letters. I would run to get the mail… anxious to see if my name was on a letter.
It felt very grown-up to have mail coming just to you as an eight or nine-year-old.
I also learned that receiving letters meant writing letters.
It continued between friends. In this time before cell phones and email we would write heart-felt letters about moving and new friends and sitting alone in the cafeteria the first few days in a new school. Those letters helped us feel a little less alone in our constant struggles to ‘fit in’ as we moved from place to place.
So it is fitting that My Love Story is a story of letters.
My husband and I have spent a lot of time apart… not by choice exactly, but as a result of our callings in life. We only dated three (four?) months before I moved halfway across the world.
I knew I was leaving… I didn’t want to start anything… but he lured me in.
I am so glad he did.
We were dedicated and earnest in person, saying all the right things before a new love moves across an ocean, but our love story is one of long-distance phone calls and letters.
Our love story is one of long-distance phone calls and letters
Our love story is not one of perfection, but one of dedication and joy.
We have sent cards across-country and across two oceans. We have spent about half of our relationship apart. It hasn’t been easy, but those letters in the mail keep us connected in a way that is tangible. They are concrete. I can go back to them again and again and remember that our love is a love that takes the time to sit down in a quiet place and write.
The little boat of you and me…
There is a card in our collection. The illustration is simple. A small rowboat alone in a blue sea — the little boat of you and me. I sent him his rowboat from Japan. He sent me mine from Missouri. Even then it felt like it was us against the world…
When life gives us rough seas we still remember and talk about that card…
“the little boat of you and me went sailing on the deep blue sea we weathered winds and crashing waves and we were strong and true and brave and we were still in love so we kept sailing on the deep blue sea the little boat of you and me”
Fourteen years later we still write cards and letters.
We’ve passed our letter-writing habit on to our daughter. When I have to be away from them some of the most precious mail I receive is from that (not-so-little) girl. An extension of our love story.
