My parents shared a lifelong love and friendship even if the whole marriage part didn’t work out.
Their parents were old friends, but Les was also the boy next door, quite literally, as their houses sat next to each other on Michigan Street in Greenfield, Indiana. They had a playhouse, which Annette took very seriously based off a letter from 1957. Nine-year-old Annette went to visit her aunt on the East Coast and wrote home to check on things.
There is a lot I love about this letter: her cursive, that she called her little brother “sweet big Jeff,” that she asked, nay demanded, her mom to give the letter to my dad, that she dated the letter twice, and those two lines of hers to my almost-nine-year-old dad that sound to me like “Hope you’re doing fine but that playhouse better be thriving.” Her letter never fails to make me smile.
coming full circle 