Waiting for the Mail

I'm not the only one who's ever waited for the mail. This spring I had the pleasure of taking a memoir-writing class, even though business demands forced to me to drop out before the end of the semester. It was taught by a friend, Marilyn Donahue, well-published children’s author, local SCBWI Schmooze coordinator, past co-director of the Inland Writing Project and writing instructor-extraordinaire. One of our assignments was to find an old family photo and write about it. While digging through shoeboxes of old pictures several years ago, in preparation for creating scrapbooks for my two brothers and me, I found one I especially liked. I’ve posted it here, along with the memoir piece it inspired. Those ladies knew what waiting was all about.

Waiting for the Mail

Every afternoon the women gathered in the yard of the housing project. With hair done up in bobby pins and wearing flowered house coats, they shared gossip and recipes for casseroles the kids would eat. Children played lazy games of kickball in the dust. Les Brown’s music drifted down from an open upstairs kitchen window. Washing could wait; so could the ironing. Babies were napping, but still the women listened with only one ear while they chatted. Some rubbed their lower backs, standing with that unique posture of the pregnant—the backward lean to counter the baby weight. Others had grimy toddlers tugging on their skirts. They were more than friends; they were sisters. And so they waited together.

No men were there. The husbands were in Italy, France, North Africa, or somewhere in the Pacific. Some were pilots, some were cavalry. Others were foot soldiers sleeping in foxholes across Europe or sailors on battleships off the shores of Iwo or Saipan.

Well, it’s not entirely true that there were no men. There was one, and every afternoon he became the most important one in the world. He was the mailman, and when he arrived on his bicycle, there was always a hopeful, smiling welcome committee. Each woman desperately prayed he’d have a letter with her name on it.

When he did, she was jubilant. When he didn’t, it was impossible not to ache with loneliness. Those fragile, papery sheets of scrawled handwriting were all she had to hold onto, all that connected her to the man she loved. Parts of those letters were shared with her sisters over late-afternoon cups of weak coffee, sweetened with rationed sugar. But other parts were saved till later, tucked into housecoat pockets. Those parts would be savored over and over again in the dim light of the bedroom during the long solitary nights.

And tomorrow she and her sisters would wait again for the mailman.