Pretend productive

Because the girls have a lull in their swimming lesson schedule, I thought this week would be the perfect opportunity for them to store up some good Grandma & Grandpa time -- and for me to whip the house into showing shape without the "help" of those little tornadoes. (Tres follows me around as I clean, rearranging things and singing, "Cleem up! Cleem up! Evvy evvywah!" Cute, yes; helpful, no.)

I've spent the day working in the office -- you know, the one of "piler" fame; I've finally had to find a more attractive system for storing all those papers. DH -- good man -- has not once uttered a smug I Told You So, though I guess now would be a good time for it if he wanted to. Oh well. I'm sure he's just glad it's finally getting cleaned up in here.

This room is taking longer than any of the others, though, because it's not just a matter of putting things away -- every paper needs to be scrutinized, decided upon: File in a drawer? Put in this notebook or that box? Shred it? And, of course, there is the temptation to stop and really look at everything: The beautiful scrapbook of our friendship that K2 made me for Christmas one year; baby shower photos; a love letter (oh brother) I wrote to DH when we were newlyweds; a drawing Uno made me when all she could do was scribble.

One thing really caught my attention and set me to reminiscing, though: A handwritten letter from a high school acquaintance, a response to one I'd written her upon seeing her name in our hometown paper's bridal registry.

I loved this girl and hated her all at the same time -- loved her because she was beautiful, dark-haired and mysterious, smart and sarcastic and sophisticated; I hated her because she was all those things and I just knew the boy I loved would fall for her if given half a chance. (For the record, I don't know if he ever did. But if I were him, I would have, lol.) Her name was Tanja -- with a J; no conventional Y for this one. I told her, when we first met at a writing group, that the spelling of her name reminded me of a recent foreign exchange student at our school -- Vanja, from Bosnia -- who had been sent home because she (allegedly) killed and ate her host family's cat. She liked that.

I always wanted her approval. I wanted her to think I mattered, that I could be sophisticated rather than ... small, that I had some kind of talent. Although we attended different high schools, she somehow ended up signing my yearbook: "Some people drink coffee to stay awake," she wrote. "Some people drink coffee because they like the taste. Coffee is coffee; I'm glad you drink tea." She knew I drank neither, but the sentiment of her metaphor meant the world to me.

I wrote her a letter a few years later, when I saw her name in the paper, to tell her (vaguely, in a non-creepy, non-stalkery way) how much I had admired her back in the day, to ask how she was doing (aside from the obvious), and to fill her in on my life. She wrote back, scrawled in loopy black ink on thin white paper, that she had been charmed by my correspondence (and my pen! lol), that she had admired me, too, and that I had "the soul of a poet."

::Blush::

We never wrote or spoke again after that, which was fine; as I said, we were acquaintances more than friends. But it was nice -- especially in those days -- to find reciprocated affection where I wouldn't have expected it. And though she turned out to be not much more than a footnote in my life (we only hung out for a few months one Spring, for the short period she came to my writing group), it was nice to find her letter tucked away in a binder in one of my many piles.


~RCH~