Guest Column

Next chapter may be best yet for sisters of the pen

By DARCY MANESS
Published December 7, 2007

In the early 1970s, the Iowa school systems offered a pen-pal program. I was 9 years old when I handpicked my pen pal from an eternal list of countries. Mine was Japanese and living in Hawaii, but as far as I was concerned, she might as well have lived on the moon.

Growing up in Iowa and spending your waking imaginary lives in endless fields, the only world outside of Iowa was the moon. I mailed her a letter and hoped to hear from her soon.

Fall faded into winter and winter to spring, and - well, you get the rest - and I received a return letter from her the summer after my 10th birthday. She was a year younger and that was the beginning of, as they say, a wonderful relationship.

That was just more than 37 years ago. Yep, you read that right. Thirty-seven years. We started with the U.S. Postal Service to keep us connected. I'll never forget the 10-cent stamp it took to mail her a letter - and no more if I stuffed pictures inside the envelope.

I'd purchased my first camera with five Bazooka Joe bubble gum wrappers and about $1.50, and photos began to fly through the postal system via cargo ship to the far-away land of Hawaii.

I had no idea what Hawaii was all about, but I'd watched enough Gilligan's Island to know Nadine Takara was stranded on a tiny island living in small grass huts.

Whenever I'd send her a letter, I'd draw a sidebar of artwork to help her understand the "ways of the world." It was a hoot. Once, I wrote her to tell her my family was into bowling, and I drew the alley and pins and three-holed ball on the left with my best one, two, three steps on how to play the sport. It wasn't until 35 years later that she filled me in on the fact that Hawaiians did in fact have bowling alleys.

(Of course I'd realized it a few years after that infamous letter, but while reminiscing about our years of correspondence, she reminded me about that silly letter from a sheltered little girl from Iowa.)

I went on to motherhood and she went on to a career as a seamstress. We married, divorced and dealt with unreasonable mothers, all of this put to pen. We've chronicled our lives through our first marriages and my three children, and went on to our current marriages and my seven granddaughters.

We've written about loss, pain and joys, and, on rare occasions, we've called each other. She called me when her beloved father died and we discussed the grief of shared losses when my father passed on a few years later. And those pictures! Those hundreds of pictures that swam the Pacific Ocean waves and crossed the delta of the muddy Mississippi River to our mail boxes have been preserved safely in our common photo albums.

Now that we're in our mid/plus 40s (odd, after all these years she's still a year younger) we have the Internet and instant messaging to stay in touch. And stay in touch we do; like sisters of the same ancestors, our love for one another has blossomed over the decades as deeply as any blood-born sisterhood does. We are more sisters today as any of our own sisters are to each other.

We'd planned on meeting on numerous occasions, but our paths never crossed. My twin lived on the same island she did back in the 1980s, but they never met. And now, as fate would have it, my pen pal sister, Nadine, has recently remarried and relocated her life to McKinney, Texas - the very city in which my youngest daughter and her family reside.

If the Gods are kind to us, we will finally get to meet, face-to-face, for the first time in our 37-year relationship.

I try to make a trek to see my daughter's family at least every other year, and this coming May holds even more than my annual retreat to Texas - it may just hold a lifelong dream come true for my pen pal and me; I may just get to meet my sister for the first time.

Darcy Maness lives in Spring Hill. Guest columnists write their own views on subjects they choose, which do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.

[Last modified December 6, 2007, 20:16:01]