Things we can’t quite say face to face, find safety in a letter. Depending on the receiver the writer’s truth is shaped or slanted. It’s deliberate and thoughtful it’s meant to enlighten or entertain. What I knew then, and know today, is that the letter is an incredibly powerful way to say what’s in your heart. This was a time without text or email, a time when long distance was expensive, and the letter was the way your life arrived in other worlds, and other worlds entered your existence. It’s safe to say, Daddy Long Legs was the book that made me fall in love with letters, the book that made me go on to write long missives of my own to friends from camp, and friends in far off places, and friends of friends who arrived as unofficial pen pals. It wasn’t a child’s book by any means, I know now it was considered a “college book,” but like many voracious readers in 1968, I read any book that landed in my hands. An epistolary novel, it was told entirely in letters penned by a college girl named Judy and sent to her mysterious benefactor, a man she nicknamed Daddy Long Legs. The book was Daddy Long Legs, written in 1921, by Jean Webster. A family book? We didn’t have books in my family, and I knew with those few words I was holding something special in my hands. It was old, with yellowed pages and a dull gray cover which meant the book was an antique, a keepsake, like the fancy crystal at my grandmother’s. Still she gave me the great kindness of a book. A girl who lived on the north side of the creek in a neighborhood I hadn’t yet discovered. I was the new girl in the classroom, attending my fourth school in as many years, and Georgia was a girl I barely knew. I read many books that year, book after book from the low shelves of Resurrection’s library, but the book I loved the best was delivered by my classmate Georgia. For a short stretch every afternoon, we sat in the warmth of winter sun streaming through the windows and disappeared into our books. In 1968, I spent my days in the long silence of Sister Angela’s fourth-grade classroom. Marsworth, an epistolary novel, follows the communications between a young girl and her elderly neighbor in the late 1960s.Īnd check back tomorrow to enter a contest for Sheila’s books! Sheila O’Connor shares how she was inspired to write her newest middle-grade book.
Love, Dad” in the middle of my mom’s newsier letters. I was always particularly pleased when my dad wrote-which meant that he wrote a sentence of two on the order of “Hi! How are you? Not much to say here. Few of us Books in Bloom bloggers remember the good old days of receiving letters-though this blogger, in particular, does not have as many warm memories of actually writing those letters! I especially remember checking out my college mailbox hoping for letters from family and friends.
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