I think of her so often when I am sitting up at my computer in my craft room. I have pictures of her taped to the sloped ceiling right beside my desk. So often when I am thinking about what I should write, or how I should say something - I look up and to the side - and there she is... and my words somehow flow.
She was such a major part of my life, as a child, as a teen and most especially as a young adult and right up until she passed last October.
She is gone from this world, but she will never be gone from my heart.
Her favourite colour was purple, and her favourite flowers were pansies, so when I saw this picture on a wonderful site that I follow on Face Book, Chic & Antique, with Ankica Herceg Juricevic - I knew I would be borrowing it for Aunt Margaret's Birthday!
Happy Birthday in Heaven - My Most Beloved Auntie. I miss you so.... Your passing left such a huge hole in my heart - but memories of every time we have spent together have filled that hole to overflowing!
These wonderful little flowers, are just like she was - bright and happy - no wonder she loved them so much!
She was my very first pen pal... and she was my very last pen pal.
When I was a child, any child's magazine (and yes there were magazines especially for children) had a section in the back dedicated to finding a Pen Pal. Children could leave their name and address from all over the world with the magazine and the magazine would publish them. All you had to do, was pick one that interested you, and write a letter.
I had a pen pal from Holland for many many years, and I know some friends who still write to their childhood pen pals, even though they have actually never met face to face.
Now a days one would say that the same thing could be said for people we meet on social media. We communicate with so many people we have yet to meet.
Perhaps it is similar - but when you start that communication as a a child and carry it through your entire lifetime, through every stage of your life - it really is something very special indeed.
Aunt Margaret wrote letters to adults and children alike. She wrote to my Mom and Dad all the time, but she also wrote to me as a child. If you answered her letter, you received another, and so it went. We wrote to each other faithfully until she could no longer write, which was only a year or so before she passed away. Her letters were sometimes a challenge to follow, because she had her own abbreviations for things, and she packed so much into a letter that sometimes you had to put the letter down to let your mind catch up to her writing. She sent jokes, patterns, pictures, quotes, stories, seeds, and you pretty much knew every thing that she did from each day spent since the last letter.
No one writes letters like that anymore.
I have saved a lot of her letters over the years, and a day like today is the perfect time to get them out and have a read.
Maybe that's what I will do today!
Happy BD!
(how she would have put it in a letter)
I smiled as I read about Aunt Margaret as I too remembered her unique and special ways. When I met Cam I always had to read to him the Christmas cards because as you said there were alot of abbreviations but to the trained eye you could sail through the letter quite quickly. I wished I had known her better she was a gem and the one person who the whole family respected and she seemed to be the GLUE at times that held such a big complex group of people together
ReplyDelete