A Letter To My Mother

Dear Mom, 

I have finally learned to appreciate your favorite vegetable—sweet potatoes. I’m making a shepherd’s pie with a sweet potato topping for dinner tonight. Remember how you always asked us to check to make sure you had sweet potatoes in the cupboard where you kept your onions and potatoes while making out your grocery list? I regret rolling my eyes, wondering what the big deal was. On the list they went, price circled, so we wouldn’t mess up. Those were the only times I ever bought sweet potatoes. 

It must have been the sweet potato casseroles of old with marshmallows on top—though that was never your way—that charred fluffy topping cemented my revulsion to the lowly sweet potato. I’m not sure at what point I got over that, but I wanted you to know, the Irish in me has finally taken hold. 

I’m using lamb in the shepherd’s pie tonight instead of hamburger, and I know you loved lamb. (Those patties stuffed with feta, served with mint jelly on the side?) Finally, of course there’s dessert. Baked apples with whip cream. 

It’s cold and wet tonight, but there's an empty chair with a cushion on it by the heat register. I just wanted you to know how much I love sweet potatoes. I guess what I really want to say is I wish I had another chance to tell you I love you. 

Love,

Yvonne

   

The challenge today from Punam at d’Verse - For The Love of letters is to write one. "Before the onset of the digital age," she says, "letter writing was the only way to communicate long distance. (Long distance phone calls were expensive). Thus, learning how to properly write a letter was part of any young woman or man's education."

In the present age it is so easy to keep up with people. Yet, we lose something important. The personal touch! Letter writing delivers something more to the recipient than just the words on the page. The act itself shows how much we care about a person. It's the intimacy, the information we impart by way of our handwriting, our choice of pen and paper, that connects us with the recipient in a way that cold computer screens can't."

But when was the last time you wrote one or received one?  So, in the spirit of participating in this challenge (appropriate as we enter the holiday season), to rekindle and revive the dying art of letter writing in my own small way, I wrote this letter to my mother,