This has happened before. This pushing the cart over to the horse struggle I do. I envision a whole and ignore the parts. The book has been like that.
This morning I woke up with the thought of beads THEN string. I must gather all the beads then arrange them on the string.
That is what I have been doing. It is slow and scattered. The process is disjointed. There are big beads and little beads.
Finally, this morning I realized that is the disjointed process I always use to move forward.
Bead by bead…bird by bird.
Relief came over me. I have been doing it the right way, but feeling wrong.
Thank you Arlene and John Pearson. These two people helped me see that.
Arlene is in my writing group and told me to get a piece of paper and ” Write that down right now.”
John Pearson is a bead. A relative I have never talked to who saw the train and truck aftermath.
I asked him details of how the family dynamics and the farm changed after Grandpa Pearson was killed by the train.
I sent him some posts, pictures and photos of parts of Mama’s letters. Maybe this will lure him back to that time in his life. He was fourteen then. He is eighty now.
Time is ticking away. I must hurry to collect these beads. The string will have to wait.
Before I start this post, I would like to announce that I have been blogging via my phone for the past year or more. This is my first time back on a computer on the mountain. Boy, did I see past mistakes! Between the tiny screen and the tiny keys, it was hard to see what I was sharing. I have finally moved back to a computer because the book I am writing got so big it needs Scrivener for me to control it. My printer has decided to work as well, so this has been an exciting morning. There have been other technical difficulties, but that is nothing new.
Back to the three signs. Dismiss these if you wish. When events go way beyond coincidental, I call them signs from the Universe. That is what I say happened last week. I have posted about the copy of the letter that was sent from my mother to my aunt and back again. I also shared that the envelope from Canada did not have a date stamp. That catches you up for the rest of the story.
The next day two more related events occurred. The Universe knows that I am slow. First, I found the envelope that my mother mailed the copied letter to my aunt in. It had a date stamp of Dec 16, 2005. That was twenty years ago yesterday. My Gran died in 1995. Thirty years before that. I guess my Mama had been too busy to go through the box and read all the letters until then.
Both envelopes for mailing the copies back and forth.
So the third time I saw the letter I realized I needed to look closer than just to write a summary on a post-it note. That’s when the surprises started. The first paragraph blew my paternalism theory for the book out of existence.
The first sentence was, ” Well ’tis done____ for better or for worse! The letter goes on to describe their efficiency apartment and includes a hand-drawn map of it. This map is the only thing I remembered from seeing the original letter in the box disguised as a book. My goal then was just to get them in order.
The next several paragraphs glowingly described things in the apartment. Then comes the sentence, “I wish you could see my ring! … It’s platinum with five diamonds. The engraving is exquisite. It has EMD – DIP 5.10.’29 on the inside.”
Here comes number two bonus of the more than coincidental events. My sister called to tell me to look for some things I had found earlier and bring them to her over the holidays. I really wanted to do it later, but was afraid I would forget. I stopped what I was doing to go find that box and stick it in my suitcase.
The box in the box.
I opened it to be sure it was the right box and there inside that box another little box. Written on the top was “Wedding Ring (Broken).” I opened the box to find two pieces of a platinum ring with only one diamond left embedded in it. I got out my jeweler’s loop and looked inside it.
There it was! EMD – DIP on one piece and 10. 29 on the other.
My Gran’s wedding ring mentioned in the letter.
Believe what you wish. I am just sharing the facts.
