Clouds and Love letters

By Fred Owens

People used to write love letters, and people used to keep the ones they received. This is an archaic almost pre-historic practice. This journal entry was written in 2007, but refers to an earlier pre-Internet age.

Clouds and Love Letters

I sent an email to Wonder Woman -- she said she doesn't like the phone. She is booked up and out of town the next 2 weekends, so I said let's see each other again and tell me a day when you can be free and we'll think of something to do..... Wonder Woman and I both descend from the Welsh -- we have such nice surnames. This Welshness, and the fact that I am still intermittently steamed at Joan for dumping me by email -- both remind me of Rebecca, or Her R-ness, a former girl friend, more than ten years ago, who is still mad at me.

Rebecca comes to mind because she is also Welsh, and probably knows Wonder Woman, because they both know the same people. Rebecca is not likely to poison the well for me, she is not depraved like that, but she can be impressively miffed. My affair with Her R-ness was a wonderful months-long spat, interspersed with tenderness and lovemaking, followed by a series of delightfully insulting letters that we exchanged, and which I kept. Ten years after the affair, she called me to ask me to return her letters. I had kept them because they were good letters and I like to keep letters. But I said no, I would not return them. This sounds unreasonable, but the fact is that my current wife was in the room when Rebecca called and I was not able to explain that her letters -- although I still had them -- were stored in the attic of a friend in Boston, and I was hardly going to fly across the country to retrieve them.

More years passed, and I have kept moving around and now find myself in Seattle and within Rebecca's aura. She might bless my new ventures, but she might find ways to embarrass me. Oh well....Postscript: I did eventually return to Boston to retrieve my belongings, and I threw out the letters, after calling Rebecca -- she said that would be sufficient and she no longer wanted them back.

Happy Valentine's Day

P.S. You may have noticed that the story has no clouds in it. The truth is that I called it "Clouds and Love Letters" just because it sounds nice.

--
Fred Owens
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