Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree of Truth.

I needed the picture frame.

I’d just  received  an  email  response  from  a  friend who’d asked my insights and when I answered, the juice just seemed to flow and I didn’t know where it was coming from but hey, there it was. Her response began with:

Life Coaching Tips

“Oh. My. Goddess. You are good, lady. That note had me sobbing my eyes out before I got more than a few lines in, and everything you said rang dead on target.”

I cut  and  pasted  her  first  lines  as well  as the  rest, which  went  into  more  detail  without  giving  away  too much  person  info,  into  a  Word  document  and  then added a headline: “For whenever I may doubt…”

That  was  over  six  months  ago.  I’d  had  so  many doubts           at that  point about my intuition  that I needed visible evidence  that  I  could  actually  be  right  about something. So I decided to frame it and hang it next to my main  computer  so I could see it all the time.  The problem was, I needed a frame.

Several years ago, my someone in my office got rid of some old picture frames, some fairly nice, and asked if I wanted any since they were going into the garbage.  The two I picked had professional photos from the 1980’s— of Dan Quayle and Dick Cheney.

I later did what any good mom would do and took the photo of Cheney as a younger man and slipped it into my teenager’s history book so it would be staring at her when she opened the textbook in class.

But before that, I recycled the frames to hold a letter I treasured. A love letter. One of the two I received from my ex in the two-plus decades we were together.

So it was the frame holding the love letter that I chose to use for my  friend’s note of encouragement.  It made me realize how writing love letters has become a lost art.

As a writer, I am, of course, quite fond of them. I wrote hundreds to my ex during the course of our courtship. And those  were  before  emails  and text messages took over most of our correspondence.

I’m convinced  that  no  one  writes  love  letters  any more. Not that I’d ever put them in my own handwriting now, anyway, because my penmanship is horrible, but the idea of ink on paper and pouring your heart out still ap-peals to me, to my senses.

Maybe I’m archaic when it comes to that. We want things so  quick  and easy and instant gratification  these days. We want a response and we want it now.

Maybe the lost art of writing love letters is really the lost art of romance?

That reminds  me  of  my  most  recent  conversation with AngelSu where we talked about how people crave the romance and want the happy home but don’t do the right things to get it. They want the results desperately but they’re not willing to do the work it takes to be romantic or develop a relationship.

I think, being a born romantic, that I probably made the romance aspect easy for the men in my life. I seemed to  have  enough  ideas  and  ideals  and  romanticism  for both of us. I loved creating a special home  and special time,  and  coming  home  from  a  hard  day  at  work  to shimmy into lingerie and cook a nice meal with candlelight and wine and fine china and music and fancy napkin folds.  I  loved  the  picnics  on  the  beach  and  the  quiet walks under the stars and holding hands and slipping little notes of affection into the next day’s business papers.

I liked pictures  of places visited,  adventures  shared, smiles.

But no matter how you frame romance, it’s at its best and most  beautiful  when the “burden”  of the effort is shared.


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