Just so you know that I have seen them and I thank you for your kind wishes. I was truly expecting cheers and fireworks.
The novel began when her cousin sent me a photo of Florence at sixteen going on seventeen in her convent school outfit. She was as lovely then as when we met except her lovely dark eyes have a sadness that should not have been there. I thought, dear God why could we not have met then, it would have saved so much heartache on both sides. That was when the idea of the novel began. Now if you can picture an eighty-three year old former standards and technical writer/lecturer attempting a love story I expect I will hear the laughter all the way here. It is interesting learning how to write, the current twenty-five chapters have undergone numerous revisions and grown in size in the process. The really strange part is that some parts simply flow off my fingers as if I was simply an electric typewriter putting someone else’s words up on the screen.
The other ‘actual’ love story has also been written around our letters by me putting in the remembered content of phone calls and face-to-face meetings. That one, of course, will not be published in our lifetimes. Nor even after unless our Son or Granddaughters choose to do so. Our Son has read the love letters and must have been impressed as he began calling her Mom afterward. He did say that they were beautiful and poetic. I do thank God for the thirty-one years we have had, if you can picture one immortal soul that just happens to inhabit two earthly bodies, that is us. They have found that arguing shortens couples lives, having only had four in all those years we will probably be around for a while yet.
See you somewhere down the road.