love letters---
By: Melody Roby Olson
She sits down to spin her tale; the story about how a simple act of kindness, an invitation on someone else's part, impacted her life, her destiny, her fate.
When she was fifteen her big brother was away serving in the United States Navy. His ship was going to go on leave in San Francisco, where his family lived. Her brother asked his buddy if he wanted to come home with him and have a good home-cooked italian meal. The buddy, a cowboy from Wyoming accepted the invite.
Her eyes shine brightly with love and fondness as she remembers; walking down the stairs as the two young men arrive, her big brother and his buddy. As she is coming down the stairs her eyes are drawn to the pretty green eyes of her brother's friend and her heart skips a beat or two. From that moment on, she does not leave her brother's side and tags along with the two friends the whole weekend. When it is time to go back to their ship, she promises to write! After they are gone, she looks right at her Mother and tells her, that someday, yes someday she will marry him!
The first few letters are fairly generic/platonic. The letters begin as simple correspondences and are pleasant as she tells him, about the silly things that happened at school or what is new at home. He looks looks forward to her letters and begins writing back to her and the friendship blossoms; over time it begins to grow into something much more!
As each letter arrives the young girl tucks it away with the rest of the letters, until she has a box full of beautiful love letters tied with a ribbon.
When the green-eyed sailor was done with his tour in the Navy, he asked the beautiful italian girl to be his wife. What she had said to her Mom was true, she did marry him! Dreams do come true!
They were happily married for over 30 years, the two of them had three children together and lived a very happy life!
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Now, as I sit here putting down to paper the story I have heard over the years, told to me by that young girl who grew into my beautiful Mom; I am blessed to have this love story to hold on to. That dreams can come true. I wish it had a better ending though, you see when the sailor boy was a mere 55 years old he died of cancer and left his beautiful bride of thirty two years. The sadness was so overwhelming to my beautiful Mom, the grief so encompassing that she took those love letters, all wrapped in a special bow, and she burned them! When I found out what she had done, I was upset and told her I would have loved to have them as a keepsake but, her response was, "those were our special letters, private love letters, mine and his alone."
So, I often wonder what those sweet letters would be like to read. They wrote to each other over a period of three years, and the love just grew to bursting, until the only thing left to do was, begin a life together. Oh, such love. Such beautiful sweet love. I like to think about the two of them and how it all started because, my Uncle asked his friend to come home for a visit and a home-cooked meal. The rest, well the rest is destiny.
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❤💙💓👍👏💜💞
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