This is a letter opener that was in the silver that my sister-in-law Beth has that belonged to my mother.  You can’t see it here, but it’s engraved with the initials “MMH”, which we assume are her initials – Marion Malone Hunter.  It occurred to me afterwards that it could also have belonged to my grandmother, also named Marion Malone Hunter, called “Mame” by her peers and family, called “Mocha” by her grandchildren.  At least the ones that matter.  J

Anyway, Beth and I imagined Mother using this letter opener to open letters from home while she was in Germany.  We haven’t come across any letters during that time period, just postcards, but I would imagine she wrote letters too.  And received letters from friends and family.

I’ve mentioned before that I like to write.  I’ve always enjoyed writing stories, although I don’t know that any of them are any good.  I’m sure that I violated many copyrights by rewriting “Dark Shadows” storylines to include a few extra characters, one of which was always me.  And I’ve rewritten other TV shows and movies to suit myself.  I have even written a whole novel, although I’ve never tried to get it published.  I did send it to a romance novel contest, which I did not win or even place, so someone other than me actually read it.  I hooked up with a critique partner a number of years ago who read the beginning of my novel and gave me feedback, both good and painful to hear.  But when I gave her some critical feedback about her own novel, I never heard from her again.  I don’t know if she did it because she was pissed at me or if she got bored with my linear storyline, but in any case, I’ve let it sit.  I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything with it.  She suggested a secondary story line, but I can’t think what it would be.  I recognize that I need one, but I’m not sure who would be the focus of that.  When I wrote it initially, I wrote a fictionalized version of my own life, with a fantasy ending of sorts.  It didn’t really end up having a happy ending, so it probably wasn’t true romance fiction, but it was a story I wanted to write.  But it was very linear and probably wouldn’t have been that interesting to others.

I started working on another story that was based in Wrightsville Beach.  I told a friend about it and he wanted to help me with the secondary plot line, so he “helped” me come up with this crazy story about a special kind of coffee and a greenstone and some corporate espionage and a plot to kill someone.  But that wasn’t really “my” story and it got so convoluted at one point that I couldn’t keep up with it.  I kept writing the romance aspect of the story, because that was really what interested me, but eventually it kind of died.  I had a lot of pieces and parts to the story, but found that I couldn’t put them all together cohesively.  And when he stopped helping with the story, it just fell apart.

So I will probably never be a best-selling novelist.  I’ll probably never retire to the beach to write on my porch.  And since Oprah went off the air, I’ll never be on The Oprah Winfrey Show as her book club’s latest read.

I remember writing letters.  Some of the first letters I remember writing, and receiving, were when I went to Girl Scout camp for two weeks.  I did that two summers in a row.  The first summer I was so homesick that I think I cried my eyes out whenever I got a letter and I probably was pleading with my parents to come rescue me in the letters I sent home.  (They didn’t.  Rescue me, that is.  They made me stay.)  The next year, I remember getting a little misty-eyed over a letter my brother John wrote to me telling me about what was going on on “Dark Shadows”, which was my favorite show.  I wasn’t homesick that year, but the letters were still nice.  I’m sure mine were more positive that year.

I really got into letter writing when we moved back South from New Jersey, after my junior high school years.  I had several friends that I wrote to, long letters about life in Georgia.  Most of those friends didn’t write back, but I kept up a long letter writing habit with my friend Irene Jacus.  It was always a big day when I got a letter from her.  They were always several pages long and full of juicy gossip and information.  I would wait to hear from her and then write her back, first commenting on all the tales she told and then adding my own.  We continued to write each other well into our adulthood.

When my best friend Debbie moved to Houston, we started writing each other.  Similarly we wrote long letters about what was going on in our lives and sharing thoughts about the soap operas we both watched.  And I always was excited to get a letter from her.  We also sent each other cards, picking out the ones that we thought reminded ourselves of each other.  Eventually the day came when we sent each other the same card at the same time.  I remember laughing when I opened it because I had just sent it to her a day or so before.  We still write, although now it’s via email instead of letters.  And I get just as excited when I see that I have an email from her.

So I’m guessing that when Mother was in Germany, she got excited too when there was a letter from home.  And especially since she wouldn’t have been able to call family and there was no email or IM or Facebook or Twitter back in those days, she’d have to wait to get the mail to see if there was something from home.  And sending letters to and from Europe probably took forever, so it would have been an even bigger deal.  And I imagine her sitting in her room with this letter opener, savoring the opening of a letter from home, hoping it was multiple pages full of gossip and information and interesting tidbits.  And then reading it over and over, imagining the letter writer telling her all of these things.  And then picking up a pen and some paper and, with the letter she had just gotten next to her, starting to respond, first with responses to what was in the letter she had just received, and then with the stories of her own adventures and travels. 

Without all the party talk, though.  J