A Labor Of Love

It used to be on Labor Day I'd wash all the windows.  Or scrub the house down.  Three-day weekends were, more often than not, spent alone and nothing says "I don't care, I'm fine" like Windex.

I had a very neat house for no one to visit.  It was all very artist-like, my lament of loneliness.

This Labor Day, the Mariner working, I couldn't have cared less about how clean the windows should be.  There was no loneliness in the house, not with electronic messages going back and forth with the Mariner at work and certainly not with two cats insisting on the many things that comprised the lifestyle they had come to expect.

A perfect time to pull out more files of letters, spanning four decades and one city with a brief visit to China in between. 

You get to know the nature of your nature, someone once said to me.  She was encouraging me to see what I was doing to, how I was building my life.  I didn't at the time.  All I saw was the world saying no to my own wishes and desires.  That heartbreak always looked good in the movies, so why not?

Opening stuffed folders and old envelopes, in between delightful scrawls on lovely stationary from friends traveling the world (like Delaware), were these notes.  No matter what decade it was or the circumstances I had shared with them, a handwritten page here, a typed letter there, acknowledging I didn't want to talk to them but if I changed my mind, would I....

And then an email, neatly printed out and carefully filed as one did in those early days of computer post, from a friend saying how hard it was to hear I had never felt loved when our many years of friendship clearly proved otherwise.

All those years in words here and there, letters kept and never answered, offers spurned...the nature of my nature.

One apology has already been sent, another being drafted in regrets and thoughts.  No pretty paper needed, just a quick search on Facebook, the white pages of the 21st century, and three more boxes to sort out.

The note sent, and the futures ones to follow all carry the same message:

I'm sorry, I was an idiot and thank you for the love.
Sincerely,
 

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