I just ordered this scale off of etsy.com Surely I’m not the only one that loves etsy. I saw this scale and the memories flooded back. I never owned a postage scale. But oh how I loved sending my Uncle David letters. Oh how I loved my Uncle David. So much so my son carry’s his name forever. (Keith David) I’m sure I’ve blogged this before somewhere. My Uncle David was 18 and I was 8.  He was a bit lost, oh but he was kind and good and everyone loved him. He joined the Marines and he left and I missed him madly. I was 8 and he was my hero.
I wrote him letters when he took off for the military. He was at Camp Lejune, then California and then a long stint in Japan. Letters….carefully scripted and laid out with joy. I adored him and I took my letter writing seriously. And he wrote back to me. His letters were amazing. I thought the world of him. Always. For 7 years we wrote each other letters. (I still have his.) When I turned 15..nearing 16 he got out of the military and he came back home…at least close to home in PA ..he was in Maryland. He came home to PA on the weekends and he got a serious girlfriend. He was 26. He got a job operating a backhoe for a construction company 2 hours away in Maryland.Â
One day he went to work, with a pocket full of cough drops, cold medicine tablets and used kleenex. He was coming home for the weekend that day. It was early December. We were all looking forward to Christmas because he was home for the holidays for the first time since I was 8.
My grandmother smelled something burning that afternoon but found nothing wrong in her house. She spent a half hour looking for the source of the burning smell to no avail.Â
That afternoon my Uncle was operating his backhoe, removing a tree from muddy wet ground. It was a soggy cold December day in Maryland. They were putting a shopping mall there. His backhoe tipped into the hole left behind from the tree. When it tipped he jumped from the backhoe. He jumped to the wrong side and was crushed instantly.
My world changed that afternoon when my mother told me “You’re Uncle David was killed today in a backhoe accident”. That was the first time I learned all about loss. All about pain. All about agony. It was the first time I knew how much a person could hurt inside. Those were dark weeks watching my grandparents grieve for their son. Hard dark weeks when I would have killed for just one more letter. And then Christmas came. My Uncle had bought everyone a Christmas gift just a week before his untimely death. He had gone shopping for everyone with my Aunt Kathy (his sister). On Christmas Eve, age 15 I opened white gold hoop earrings from my Uncle David. His signature on the attached card hurt so bad. The loops of the a…the dot on the i strangling the air from my chest. He was supposed to be home for the first time in forever, but he was instead gone.
I loved him more than anyone I knew at that time. I looked up to him. He taught me my ABC’s when I was 4. I remember reciting them and angering my older sister who was struggling to learn her ABC’s. I remember feeling better than her just once in my life…that day. Because of Uncle David. I remember laying on his chest watching The Adam’s Family and clicking her fingers to the opening jingle together. My memories of him are so vivid, so alive, so completely forever.
Postage. Mail. I have so many reasons to love a letter in the mail. My Uncle David was the first person who taught me the power of a letter. The love that could be contained within. The permanence of the written word. The power of love stringing through the sentences winging their way across countries, lasting lifetimes, making their mark on hearts for a lifetime.
I saw this scale and I remembered him. I bought it. It’s winging it’s way to my house. The art of writing a letter, it’s slowly being lost.
Write someone a love letter today. For me. For my Uncle David. For someone to have and keep forever. Lives end but words written down last.
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