Page 18 of Persuading Penny
She walks in beauty like the night
of cloudless climes and starry skies
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
I stopped reading and clutched the letter to my chest. I’d initially thought his appreciation of poetry was just a romantic part of a persona he’d concocted. But he really did have a love of words, and he loved to share it with me.
Lord Byron was one of his favorites and he often cited him, just a line here or there.
But this –She Walks in Beauty– I do believe was my favorite.
I read the rest and pulled out another and another, smiling as I remembered how young we were back then, how naive. Then I laughed as I read one particular paragraph of his letter.
Darn it. I’ve been caught. Classmates saw me dropping a letter in the mailbox and questioned me about it. They can’t believe that I am actually taking pen to paper to write a letter to a girl...a girl in England, no less.
They insist that I ought to simply send you an email instead of what they call snail mail.
I hope you don’t agree with them. I don’t know why, but there is something about waiting for your response, not at my computer, but every day when I go check the mail.
Who knows. Maybe I’m just old fashioned the way my dad was.
I remembered my reply. I was adamant that we continue to write handwritten letters. I loathed emails with the exception of certain business communications.
And now, hugging those handwritten words...should I hug my laptop to my chest if he’d listened to his classmates? No. These letters were real. They were tangible and not in some...in some cloud somewhere.
I thought back to the letters I sent him. I had kept a few of the first drafts of certain letters. In one of them, I’d sent a favorite poem of mine.
Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow
.
In so many letters he’d written about the snow that had fallen and that had temporarily blanketed the ground. On seeing this poem, I knew I had to send it to him.
He knew it, of course, but was nonetheless pleased I’d shared it with him.
I plunged my hand once more into that outer compartment of my suitcase and pulled out a letter; the last letter that he’d sent me.
Oh. A sharp pain suddenly squeezed at my heart, and I knew that reading the letter would only intensify that pain.
This was the letter he’d written a day prior to my sending him the letter my Aunt Sally had forced me to write him.
Tears flowed before I even began to read.
Hello, my lovely Penelope!
