Eighty Memories for Eight Years: #64 This is All About You

Photo Credit: Jane Milner

Medicine Hat Walkway
Jane is my cousin and Aunt Annetta's daughter.
Aunt Annetta takes a warm place in this story.

Photo Credit: Jane Milner

Photo Credit: Jane Milner

Connected to that Women’s Studies degree is another vivid memory.

The backdrop to the story is that when I was taking a class on women’s writing, the professor said that it is difficult for women to use the ”I” pronoun, to write about their experiences, their lives.

Writing wasn’t hard for me.

By this time, I had been writing letters home for about 30 years.

Sometimes copies of the letters might have also gone to sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts – like my Aunt Annetta. I had a long list of loved ones to whom I regularly mailed my letters.

Soon the mailing cost was a burden to our budget. So I shortened the mail-out list.

One day when I was in Medicine Hat and visiting her, Aunt Annetta asked why no more letters?

I told her it was just cost saving for me.

She put $20 into my hands and said, here, this should be enough for postage for the year to me.

Yes, those letters were filled with news about everyone.

But I was learning a new writing craft, trying to practice what I had learned in class about women’s writing, I decided to type a letter that was all about me.

No mention of my kids or my husband, my friends or professional people I was meeting. Just a me, me, me letter.

That was not an easy letter to write.

Off it went in the mail. No one could have been more surprised than me when I got a phone call from one of my readers.

I had never received a phone call about any of my letters for 30 years.

Now I heard a voice reminding me for the content of that letter, so selfish, not a word about my husband or my children.

Photo Credit: Jane Milner

Duck in a Puddle

which reminds me of a family game,

Duck on a Rock

I rarely take offense and didn’t to this phone call. I just went to the analytic part of my brain and did some math.

Multiply one letter a week for 52 weeks for 30 years, the content of my letters about watching my husband and children.

That is on one side of the ledger.

Photo Credit: Jane Milner

... photo taken from one of Jane's walks in Medicine Hat ...

On the other side, one letter in my lifetime all about me.

Arta

*I am laughing while writing this, just warning my reader that the next 4 memories are going to be all about me. Just me. That is the spoiler alert! No phone calls please.