By Winnie Bolton
A busy mind!
That’s what I have got.
It’s going all the time and it won’t stop.
Also I talk to myself a lot but the latter comes from my Irish roots. All the women in my family talked to themselves.
When I was a little kid, I thought talking to oneself was a strange behavior and that my mother was even stranger. As I matured, I had become one of them, a trait I vowed never to practice but to my delight found I was my own best listener.
Why, I can scold myself and not become embarrassed. Praise myself and not become narcissistic. Forgive myself, resolve problems and thoroughly enjoy my inner kingdom.
Is that what cloning oneself would be like? Never mind. Just the passing thought of a busy mind.
Guess my mother, grandmother and aunties weren’t weird after all. Presently, much of my talking to myself spills onto paper like writing letters, writing columns, writing anything – notes, lists, etc.
Most times one plans letter writing undisturbed. One cannot do that with the phone, well least the one on the receiver’s end.
They may be busy when you are not or vise versa. One can always lose their train of thought while talking or listening but with a letter there it is: the words in black and white, handwritten or typed and pretty much thought through.
Writing is a solitary function but so is thinking and reading. When writing, the soul gets the opportunity to speak if we listen carefully to the heart because we hear the truth.
When we speak with others, we can certainly hide parts of ourselves and still feel functional or could be just plain misunderstood.
My mom died many years ago and though I loved hearing her lilting Irish brogue over the phone (she lived on the East Coast) I treasured most the letters I received from her in the mail. Her letters were full of misspellings, run on sentences and flavorful expressions unique to only to her.
Unfolding and reading one of my mother’s letters, my memory is delighted and I smile as her words take me back to her newsy items about which she would write. I become alive and feel her sweet presence with me – her deep love of people.
I’ve also saved my father’s poetry written especially for my graduations, birthdays and wedding day. My mother-in- law’s letters are treasured beyond measure with the humorous tales about relatives. All are tucked away but read more often than not because they bring back loving awareness.
But the best letters I’ve saved are from my own kids when they were away from home in college. I’m saving them for my grandchildren – the gift of when their parents were kids.
Peeking into the past, yet present is a powerful connection to those memories we hold so dear.
