As a writer, I love it when a story just falls out of the sky on top of my pointy little head. So, as I sit out here on my back porch on a warm February morning, watching the lightning on the deep black horizon, and listening to the thunder roll through my Rip Van Winkle mind, and trying to hear the words in my head over the sound of a relentless rain pattering on the world outside my screened windows, I am grateful for a letter I hold in my lap.

I’ve read this letter a dozen times trying to soak up the images between the lines. It’s only one page long. Written in a beautiful cursive, each letter a perfectly coiled example of a disciplined penmanship. Not a single flaw. Not one word crossed out. Every vowel effortlessly rounded. Each lower-case consonant stretching up to the perfect height or dipping below the line with the precision of a surgical stitch.

This is the work of a woman. Before I knew anything about the letter, I could tell this. When a man writes a letter, two things happen. Hell freezes over and penmanship goes out the window. The ink that comes from a pen, when held by a male hand, forms words strung together like railcars piled up after a freight train jumps the tracks.

This letter is a work of art.

It’s not important how this letter came to be in my possession. But when it was handed to me, I was told that it was meant to be shared. I am lucky enough to know the person who gave me a copy of it. I’ve met the guy who first received it. I know a little bit of the story behind the story.

First, I will tell you that it’s a love letter. Hoo boy! My allergies flared up the first time I read it, and I needed a sleeve to clean up the mess on my cheek. It’s not all gushy, or anything like that. It’s actually pretty plain spoken. But the lines tell a common story. And if you’ve been there, you know.

Here goes.

Mary Nell was 62 years old in the fall of 1999. October 17th was the day she sat down at the kitchen table early one morning. The coffee was hot. It was still dark outside. The clock on the wall above the sink had the little hand on the 6 and the long hand on the 10. The sounds of the Gospel Hour on WSB quietly came over the radio on the counter next to the stove.

It was a Sunday morning and she had things on her mind. Bob, her husband, worked out of town a lot. He was gone, which meant that she was all alone in the house with her thoughts. Mostly she was thankful. She had a good life. A good marriage. And she was feeling moved to put a few words on paper.

You see, Mary Nell’s mind was beginning to slip. She would forget little things. And I’m not talking about walking into a room and not being able to recall why you came in there in the first place. I’m talking about forgetting the address of where you live. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, it worried her.

That kind of slip gives a person reason to pause and evaluate her life. Which is why Mary Nell is at the kitchen table with a notepad and pen in her hand. She’s more alert and more full of life right now than she’s known for all the 41 years of their marriage. There’s been no kids, but she accepted that a long time ago.

She’s had Bob.

“Dearest Bob,” she writes. “Thank you for being my husband for all these years. It was love at first sight as you walked across the lawn after parking your green Ford at the Base Housing Office.”

She can see that day as clearly as if it was yesterday. The stride of his gait. The color of his car. The tilt of his army cap. She knew right then and there that they would be together.

“You have been so good to me and so understanding. Thanks for caring for my parents and my family of cousins. Thanks for a comfortable, protected life.”

It was the simple things that meant the most to her. Just a man who took the time to “get her,” and who would embrace her family, and who would sit with her as she sat with her aging parents.

She put it this way. “You have been my backbone through some pretty trying times in my life.”

She overheard some young girls at the store the other day making fun of marriage. They evidently had a friend about to walk the aisle and they were saying how outdated it all was and how they’d never say vows like that in a million years.

Mary Nell wished they knew what she knew.

“You have showered me with your love and with material gifts. Who would have thought that I would live in a brick house, drive the nicest of cars and wear nice jewelry.”

Born in 1937, Mary Nell grew up in a South Georgia town where a house of any kind was a comfort and dreams of anything but the bare necessities were just wishes not worth making. She’d only seen a brick house once before down in Valdosta. That was a world to which she didn’t belong.

When she married Bob, she knew right off he was a fine man. Their years together bore testimony to that.

“Thank you for being a Christian, for working in the Church, for helping others. To some you may be ordinary, but to me you are wonderful.”

Mary Nell got up to refill her coffee pot. Just a few more things to say, she thought to herself.

You may think it odd to write a letter like this. She’s not on her death bed. She’s still young with a lot of life left ahead of her. But Mary Nell knows that one day she will forget. She’s seen it before in her family. She will forget all about the green Ford. She will not remember the brick house or the pearl necklace. She knows that a day will come when she won’t feel comfortable and protected.

So, she chooses to write it now.

“Take good care of yourself. Build your dream home on the big lake.” Bob loved to fish. “And remember me.”

She was near the bottom of the page. “Thanks for bowling, pizza, golf, and city life. I love you dearly, much more than I’ve probably shown. Yours, Mary Nell.”

That’s where she stopped. She folded the letter and creased the edges. She wrote one small instruction on the back. “To Bob. Open this at my death.”

You never know how long it may take for a letter to reach its destination. It was another 23 years before Bob would open it. He made copies and has been handing them out ever since.

Who says true love doesn’t exist?