Nothing Much Happens by Kathryn Nicolai

Author:Kathryn Nicolai [Nicolai, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

A Letter in an Envelope

Maybe it was in second grade, or maybe third, but we’d read a book about pen pals, featuring a little girl from Portugal and a little boy from Japan.

They sent letters back and forth, talking about their families and pets and schools. There’d been an illustration of each of them waiting for the mail to come, eager to hear again from a friend on the other side of the world. It created a bit of a craze for letter writing in my class, and our teacher presented us with a list of names and addresses of children in a class in Poland who were keen on being pen pals. I’d drawn the name of a girl named Anna and dutifully set out to write her a letter. I don’t remember much now about what I wrote her or what she wrote me, but I do remember the excitement of finding her letter in my mailbox, the green paper of the envelope and the exotic look of her handwriting. I remember her number fours and how she’d inked out her j’s and f’s.

While Anna and I lost touch among the shifting responsibilities of elementary school, I never stopped writing letters and mailing them off to friends, flowers pressed into their pages, drawings of birds and trees haphazardly sketched across their envelopes, sometimes just a postcard with a joke written hastily, sometimes many pages needing extra stamps and strips of tape to hold them closed. I had bundles of letters I’d received in return—tied with scraps of ribbon and bits of twine—in a long squat box tucked under my bed. Sometimes on a rainy day, I’d dig out a pack to see what we were all talking about ten years ago.

I’d been thinking about those letters under the bed this morning when I heard the flap and clatter of my mail slot. I’d been spreading peanut butter onto a thick slice of toast for breakfast. I carried the handful of envelopes and mailers back to my kitchen table, and when I spotted the corner of an envelope, pale blue with a hand-drawn heart, I felt that same excitement that the boy from Japan and the girl from Portugal must have felt. It was a little square envelope with my name written in tiny neat script and stickers of flowers sealing it shut. I propped it up against my glass of grapefruit juice and sat down to finish my toast. I like waiting a bit to open a letter, letting the anticipation build, plus I didn’t want to get peanut butter on that pretty blue paper. I took my time, working my way through my toast and juice and a lovely ripe banana, tidying up my plates and washing my hands before I carried the letter to a sunny spot on the back porch where I could look out at the growing garden as I read.

The letter was from a childhood friend; we’d grown up on the same street but now lived far apart.

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