Ethyl recalls: Waiting for the Mailman

"What matters most is not the first chapter in your life but the last, for it shows how well you ran the race, how much you persevered, how hard you tried."
The first chapter in my life took place in Tishomingo County.  And I will never forget the things that upbringing taught me.  I learned that it didn't kill me to do without things I thought I had to have, to make do with what was available, to work hard for what I got, to dream, and also to always look forward.
And so for the most part of my life, I have looked forward.  But now that I'm older I find I spend more time looking back.  Back to a simpler time.  Back to gravel roads, and creeks, and picking blackberries and muscadines;  back to waiting impatiently for the mail to arrive for that letter I got at least twice a week from my boyfriend.
I have a memory of waiting on the porch or the front yard, watching impatiently for our rural mailman to come around the corner.  When I saw him heading up the road, I started toward the mail box.  He would watch me and if he had no letter he would shake his head no and if there was something for me, he would smile as he stopped at our box. It was later in life that I started to wonder what it was he learned about people from the mail he delivered.  Did he know those who were receiving news they wanted to hear and those who were getting mail they would rather not receive.  He certainly knew about me, that I was carrying on a long distance romance with a young fellow who was not native to our part of the country.  He also knew how frequently the letters between us were sent and received.  Every other day to be exact.  I would get a letter one day, answer it that night, mail it the next day and then a reply would follow in exactly the same manner.  Wonder what he thought.  He understood that I would be watching the mailbox, and he also knew the look of disappointment on my face if there was nothing there for me that day. Such a sweet memory.
I remember selling seeds for some seed company and the little prizes they gave you if you sold them all.  Remember pondering over the gift catalog, taking forever to finally make up my mind what wonderful thing to order and then waiting forever during the two weeks it took them to ship it.  That type of anticipation is gone from your life when you get older.  It belongs only to the young, I think.  It's not unusual to place an order now on line and have it arrive at my door step in a day or two.  That never happened when we were young.  The world wide web and UPS and FedEx changed all that. Still in most cases the anticipation and excitement over the gift far exceeded the value of the object once it arrived.  The best I can remember most of the prizes you won were pure junk.  But junk to an adult can be absolute treasure to a kid.
And then there were the weekly phone calls.  Expensive for the young with a limited amount of money, so the talk had to be brief and to the point.  A few years ago the above mentioned boyfriend who has been my husband for the last forty five years had to spend a week away from me in New York.  It was still as hard as it used to be spending weeks apart when we were young.  But the big difference was the methods of keeping in touch.  Every night I sent him an email that he would get when he checked his mail each morning. He sent a good morning back to me.  At noon when he wasn't in class and got his lunch break he called me on his cell phone.  Every night when class was over he walked the grounds and talked to me on the phone.  After forty five years we were still writing love letters to each other, only this time they arrived in minutes, not days.  And the phone calls could last as long as we wanted them to.
So we come to today.  It's not the beginning of the race that matters.  It's the end.  But sometimes looking back to the beginning can elicit memories that are sweet.  And no doubt they do get better with time.  Somehow or other when we look back we tend to remember only the good.  And it is such a sweet memory to remember our mailman and how he so often made my day when he stopped at our crocked little mailbox attached to the side of the big oak tree in our front yard.