pen pals Archives - Kate Hilton

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Love, Unexpectedly

August 1, 2016

Dear Reva,

I have so many conversations with you in my head that don’t make it onto paper.

Sometimes it’s because life intervenes, and intervenes again. But recently it’s been for a different reason entirely. I’ve been feeling shy. Our letters are public, and while there are conversations I might have with you privately, I’m not always willing to have them publicly.

Which is why I haven’t told you that I’m in love.

This is wonderful, obviously. It is a sensation I never imagined experiencing again and it is glorious.

It is also terrifying.

For starters, I’m out of practice. The last time I fell in love was close to twenty years ago, and we all know how that worked out. And then there are all the complications. Logistical ones: Dependents, responsibilities, schedules. Emotional ones: My shit. His shit. New shit that we are creating by combining all of our old shit together.

Here are some of the things you don’t do when you fall in love at our stage: stay up all night talking about the relationship (nothing is improved by losing a night of sleep); express every feeling you have every moment that you have it (no one at our age needs this kind of drama); make elaborate plans about the future (because you never know, do you?); overlook the other person’s flaws (they aren’t going anywhere); avoid hard conversations (they aren’t going anywhere); and imagine that you and he are going to change substantially from the people you are today (you made that mistake once, and the results were disappointing).

On the other hand, here are some of the things you do when you fall in love at our stage: have excellent sex as often as possible (because life is short and everything still works); get a nice boost from seeing yourself through the eyes of your new partner (interesting! funny! sexy!); talk about yourself as a person with individual preferences and interests, just like you did when you dated in your twenties (and discover that many of those preferences and interests remain the same, which is oddly comforting); and learn a staggering amount about all of your aforementioned shit.

I know what you’re thinking. That doesn’t sound very romantic, does it?

But strangely, it is. It’s about seeing past the fantasy to what is real. It’s about being equally present in Italian hotel rooms and in hospital rooms. It’s about knowing that there are no guarantees, and this might not work, and you might be humiliated, and still deciding that you’re all in. And it’s about being loved for who you are, with all the cracks and dents and imperfections that you would change if you could, but can’t.

It’s not a Disney romance, for certain. But what is it? I’ll have to keep you posted.

Lots of love,

Kate

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Repeat after me: Change is not a crisis

December 15, 2015

My desk, 7 a.m.

Dear Reva,

I’m getting an early start this morning, and because it is so dark outside, and because I’m tired, I am completely disoriented. I have to keep reminding myself that I have already slept, had breakfast, packed one child (the one who isn’t sick) off to school and settled into my work day. The fact that I have to do this – remind myself of something so simple and obvious – is one of many examples in everyday life of how much of our behaviour is patterned and based on familiar external cues.

And this, in turn, is one of the answers to your question last week about why midlife changes are perceived as a crisis. I like this question, and have thought about it a lot in my own context. I used to describe my shift into a writing career as the result of a midlife crisis, partly because it got a laugh from the audience, and partly because I thought of it that way myself. But I’ve stopped doing that. I’ve decided that it is too reductive, dismissive, and even pejorative a phrase to describe what has been, in fact, a period of transformative growth and creative flourishing.

Having said all of that, change scares us at a fundamental level. We don’t think that we are good at it. We cling to the (misguided) idea that people don’t really change, and it comforts us, giving us a sense of control and stability. And, of course, change invites failure, which we fear most of all.

Small changes can throw us off for months or even years. Think about how long it takes to settle into a new house, for example, or a new route to work. Long after we should have rewired our brains, we still find ourselves looking for the forks in the wrong drawer, or getting off at the wrong subway stop. And it makes us tired, because every time we have to substitute a real decision, one that requires our attention and consideration instead of allowing us to operate on autopilot, it takes energy.

But here’s the good news. According to Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, “Routine basically gives us the mental freedom to think about what’s actually important…Almost every single species that has survived has the ability to take routines and make them automatic. That way you have cognitive power to invent spears and fire and video games.”

In other words, all of those routines are liberating space in our brains that could and should be used to contemplate change.

My own view is that we are far too wedded to the notion that change is threatening, and that it prevents many of us from reaching our full potential. There is no question that change is difficult (we will all spend a lot of time looking for forks and getting off at the wrong stop, no matter how adaptive we are), but it is also extraordinarily energizing.

This is not to say that I wake up every day and think, “Excellent! Another day of adapting to unfamiliar experiences!” I find change tiring too, even though I have come to appreciate and even seek it. But the rewards of change are as large as your own imagination.

This week, the first copy of the US edition of The Hole in the Middle rolled off the presses and arrived in the mail. Here is a picture of me, right after I opened the envelope. Do you see the same thing that I see? Wonder, astonishment, joy, and more than a little disbelief?

That’s what change looks like.

Love,

Kate

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Brave New World

November 17, 2015

Dear Reva,

You’ve been on my mind all week, since I learned of your arthritis diagnosis. In the same week, a dear friend lost her sister to cancer.

A couple of letters ago, I talked about the shiny upside of midlife, the ushering-in of a life stage rich in professional opportunity and success. Here, though, we have the dark side of the midlife coin, where things start to go wrong with kids, marriages, aging parents, and our own surprisingly fragile health.

You will, of course, address this challenge with your characteristic grit. But I so wish that you didn’t have to. I know you will tell me if there is anything I can do, at any time, to help you.

I have news of my own. I’ve started…dating.

I was never very adept at dating, truthfully. In fact, I managed to avoid dating entirely in high school, then Macgyvered a few university hook-ups into relationships, and then went to law school and married a classmate. And now I’m going out for coffee with strangers, and remembering why it was easier to do this in university, surrounded by packs of friends and fortified with bad beer.

It is also, I have to say, a total paradigm shift to date without any objective other than companionship. I’m not looking for a father for my children (they have one, and I’m done birthing babies). I don’t need a financial partner. And I’m not trying to assess potential, as we all had to do back in our twenties. We’re fully formed adults now, most of us having been through at least one brutal life experience. We know who we are.

And we’re online.

My god, Reva, the brave not-so-new world of online dating, that has such people in it! I am learning so much, about myself most of all. Because I am an extremely nice person, I will say no more than this: it is a whole book of its own.

And it would be a shame to waste good material.

With lots of love,

Kate

Pen Pal Project

You’ve changed

September 22, 2015

My office

Dear Reva,

You’ve changed.

Has anyone said that to you recently? What was your reaction? Did you think the person meant it as a compliment or a criticism?

I ask because I’m interested, in life generally, and in the book I’m writing, in how we construct our identities. And I think that many of us resist the idea that we change. Sure, we change the music we like and the fashions we admire, but our fundamental personalities don’t change, right? Identity isn’t fashion. Identity is fixed.

In fact, the opposite seems to be true. The current neuroscience research suggests that we are constantly evolving, or, as Dan Gilbert puts it in his delightful TED talk: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

I accept that this is true intellectually, but until recently, I’ve resisted it on an emotional level. I’ve always found the idea that people change to be quite threatening. What if you invest all your energy into a relationship – a marriage, a friendship, a work partnership – and that person changes? How can you control that? How can you protect your investment?

You can’t, obviously, which I learned the hard way on several fronts.

When you go through divorce, people tell you that you’ve changed. Usually the person who no longer wants to be in a relationship with you will tell you that (and it isn’t intended as a compliment). But friends will tell you that as well. Some will mean it as an encouragement, as in the end of your marriage will allow you to grow further into the person you are meant to be. Some people don’t, as in, I can see why your marriage fell apart, because you are one of those people who changes, but I’m not, so my marriage is safe.

And because you are, in fact, changing, some of those people will remain friends, and some of them won’t.

Which brings me to the question you asked in your last letter: “Have you via your writing or otherwise ever not been liked?” Yes, I have. And it sucked.

But I’m getting better at dealing with it. Because I’m changing.

Love,

Kate

Read Reva’s last letter here:

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Turning The Page

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

My office

Dear Reva,

Moving day is on Thursday, and I am sitting in a half-empty house. I’m moving to a lovely but much smaller house, and I’ve given away a lot of furniture, all of which was picked up over the weekend. New, appropriately sized couches and chairs and tables will start arriving once we move, but for now, we are rattling around in mostly vacant rooms. We are all adapting surprisingly well to this physical evidence of a turning of a page in our family’s story.

I am thinking, of course, of the events of the past eight months that have brought me to this moment. I remember the shock, bewilderment and searing grief of a husband’s unexpected departure. I remember the blur of months spent putting one foot in front of the other, of just surviving to do it again the next day. I remember the agonizing conversion of a longstanding partnership into a set of legal obligations. I remember my children’s pain and my own. I remember the friends who drifted away, compounding the loss.

But I remember, too, everyone who swarmed around, who called, who let me cry on the phone and in restaurants and in the car and on the tennis court – everywhere, basically – and who acted like it was no big deal that I was leaking constantly, and who fed me dinner and wrote me notes, and who told me that I was fabulous and that I would heal, over and over again. I remember who picked me up when I couldn’t get off the floor on Boxing Day. I remember who took me to the park and found a patch of sunlight to warm me in the dying days of autumn. I remember who left a week of dinners on my doorstep. I remember who took me out for my birthday, and made sure I had a lovely present. I remember each and every act of kindness and love, and I am so grateful. I can’t tell you.

Which brings me to a subject I’ve thought quite a bit about over the past year: the difference between joy and happiness. No one, least of all me, would say that this has been a happy year. But it has been full of moments of unadulterated joy.

I am a big proponent of the cultivation of joy. It seems to me that joy is the great casualty of working motherhood, and of modern life more generally. We treat joy as a frivolity, a distraction from the real work of securing solid, foundational happiness. And that is a great pity, because, as the late, great Maya Angelou observed: “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.”

I’ve come to appreciate the value of joy this year, so much so that I made a video about it.

I am, by nature, quite a joyful person. And this means that even if my life turns to absolute shit in an objective sense, I can still manage to find pleasure in small things. Joy doesn’t require big plans or radical changes. Joy isn’t ambitious. And that means – listen carefully – it isn’t something we can fail at.

Isn’t that a project we should all get behind?

Yours,

Kate

Read Reva’s last letter here.

Read the Pen Pal Project archive here.

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Feeling like a ‘natural’ mother

May 20, 2015

My office

Dear Reva,

Happy Birthday!

I’m so sorry to be a day late with my letter this week, though it does give me the opportunity to wish you well on your big 3-9. I hope you got everything you wanted, including some time to reflect on your plans for the year ahead. The year before I turned 40 was a completely transformative one for me. I wouldn’t wish everyone the same experience – transformation is not for the faint of heart – but I know from your letters that you are ready for a new adventure. I’m looking forward to coming along on it.

Given that your last two letters have been about parenting, I think you will understand the reason for my tardiness: I took the boys to NYC for a long weekend, my first trip with them alone. It was a good moment to reflect on my own parenting style, and some of the questions that you ask about how and if mothering comes ‘naturally’ to women.

I’m not a fan of boxes and categories (I nearly listed ‘cages’ here, which tells you something about my approach to boxes and categories), and this is particularly true of mothering. I also get suspicious when the word ‘natural’ is applied to women as mothers. Good, natural mothers, it seems, opt willingly for whatever choice is the hardest, most painful and most self-denying; bad, unnatural mothers are those who opt on Day One for the epidural and continue, at every opportunity, to choose the path that preserves their sanity and a sense of themselves as distinct from their offspring. Selfish, really.

Of course I have times when I feel like a fraud as a mother (who doesn’t?) but for the most part, imposter syndrome takes hold when I am forced into a model of mothering that isn’t, well, natural for me.

For example, here is my personal word association for maternal failure: holiday meals. Getting my children dressed up against their will for a ‘festive’ meal and watching them struggle to use cutlery and eat food they dislike, while other family members watch in judgment is a special kind of torture for me. I am also bad at the following:

Playing, or feigning interest in, video games
Doing activities that involve being cold
Sports
Discipline
Sitting around and doing nothing
Going to the playground (see above)

But I am very good at:

Reading and instilling a love of words
Cuddles
Listening to what is said, and what is not
Adventures and special events
Creative solutions to any problem

And I find that when I parent with an emphasis on my strengths, I feel quite comfortable in the role; whereas, when I try to be a different kind of parent, a more authoritarian one, or a sporty one, or a chilled out one, for example, I feel like an imposter.

I was thinking of the event we did together the other night, where we got into a conversation about what we do for fun. One of the women in the audience said that she didn’t do much for fun, other than hang out with her children, and I said, “I don’t think parenting is fun.” It’s true. There are many things that I like to do for fun, and parenting isn’t on the list. Tennis is fun. Dinner out with friends is fun. Reading is fun. Talking about books and writing with other writers is fun. I could go on. I take delight in many things.

Parenting is work. Of course it is. Parenting is an ongoing act of love. And ongoing acts of love (as opposed to falling in love which takes little thought or effort, or even sense), are, as we know but don’t like to admit, work. Rewarding work. Meaningful work. Even joyous work. But not effortless. Not without struggle. Not without worry and frustration. Not ‘natural’.

And this is all good news, my Reva, because if we let go of the idea that there is one successful way to parent, we’ll be freer to find a way that works for us, either inside or outside the box.

Yours,

Kate

Read Reva’s last letter here: http://www.revaseth.com/penpalproject/real-mothers-day/

Read the Pen Pal archive here: https://www.facebook.com/ourpenpalproject?ref=hl

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Courage, my love

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

My office

Dear Reva,

I’m celebrating a big anniversary this week. Two years ago, I self-published The Hole in the Middle. I didn’t really choose self-publishing. I did it because I couldn’t get anyone to take me seriously as a writer in the traditional publishing business.

This week, my publisher is shipping a brand-new edition to bookstores across the country, with a quote on the front from a famous writer who also happens to be a new friend (we met at a literary festival last summer). It’s so amazing and weird that Kobo asked me to write a blog about it.

But honestly, when I look back at everything that’s happened? The self-publishing, and the crazy internet sensation, and the Canadian book deal, and the U.S. book deal, and the marriage breakdown – all of it connected, all of it complicated and bittersweet – do you know what strikes me the most?

I can’t believe how f***ing brave I was. I’m so proud of that. I’m a fairly shy person, all evidence to the contrary. I used to have a phobia about public speaking. I used to have an almost crippling anxiety about what people thought of me. The biggest obstacle to my success with the book, from the beginning, was my own fear.

Courage is a relative quality. It is quite different from fearlessness. To be courageous is to do the things that haunt you. Only you know what they are. To self-publish my book, to put myself out on social media, to tell everyone I knew that I had written something, and ask them to buy it, all the while knowing for an absolute fact that no one in the book industry believed my book deserved publication: that took every bit of courage I had, which was significantly more than I knew I possessed. (I filmed a video about it.)

And now? I feel like the old rules don’t apply to me anymore. It is scary but also truly liberating.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned: Not everyone will like you. Not everyone will value the same things you do. Not every relationship will survive forever. People change. You will too.

These are terrifying realizations, but once you accept them as true, the rules shift. The most important questions change. What do you want to contribute? What are your greatest talents? Who deserves your loyalty and your time? Who doesn’t? What are you doing because you think you should? What are you doing because you genuinely love to do it?

On a micro-level, I’m exploring these questions while choosing furniture for my new house. My designer, who is accustomed to working with couples to identify the appropriate shade of greige, is thrilled. There is no compromise. There is no discussion. What do I like? It turns out that I like … what I like. Which is random and eclectic and colourful and creative. Who knew? Here is my new carpet, for example:

My point here, and I do have one, is that we spend a lot of energy trying to figure out how to fit in with other people – families, friends, and especially spouses. But maybe we ought to practice being ourselves a little now, as Jenny Joseph’s famous poem suggests? We – all of us – deserve that.

Really looking forward to our event on Friday!

Yours,

Kate

Read Reva’s last letter here.

Find the Pen Pal archive here.

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Help wanted

April 20, 2015

Dear Reva,

Thanks so much for your letter.

First off, it must be said: you look stunning in a wedding dress.

I haven’t read Anne Kingston’s book, but it is now at the top of my to-read list. It will make a nice break from (and counterpart to, come to think of it) Anna Karenina. I stumbled across a list of the Greatest Books of All Time, and was shamed by the number that I had somehow failed to read. So I ordered a stack of them and am working my way through.

I confess that the western Disney Princess Bride fantasy exercises a powerful hold on me. This is not an easy admission. I’ve been a feminist for so long that I don’t remember any other way of being. And yet for all of my no-nonsense pragmatism, my desire for self-sufficiency and my lengthy education in gender theory, I have the heart of a romantic. And not just any romantic, but a gooey, true-love-believing, soul-mate-seeking, teenaged-girl romantic. It’s slightly mortifying.

In my defence, I am also heavily influenced by my parents’ marriage, which was and still is an extraordinarily successful love match. They met by chance when my mother was 17 and my father was 19, and have now been married for 47 years. They visibly adore each other.

But, as we know, my inner romantic has taken a serious body blow in recent months, so I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations of love and marriage. In your last letter to me, you asked whether or not we would work so hard at our relationships if we truly understood that they are impermanent. In fact, I think we work so hard at them precisely because we understand their fragility.

We understand that early romantic love is a kind of dream-state, and that lasting love requires dedicated work from both partners. What frightens us is the knowledge that marriage is a game for two, and that no amount of effort from one can make the other want to play for keeps. And we are right to be scared. We put huge trust in the hands of the one we marry, and we do it in the face of poor odds.

But we put our lives, also, in the hands of other people who form a community around us, and while each individual relationship may be fragile, the web of community relationships is not. I’ve been humbled, over and over again, by the kindness of family and friends in recent months. Some people have disappointed me, yes, but the net of support has held strong. And this makes me think that no effort invested in building relationships is wasted.

On that note, I’ve been filming videos for my website, and I did one on the importance of asking for help. I’m much better at giving help than I am at receiving it, and I’ve been learning – both through my publishing experience and through my divorce – that there is real growth to be found in opening oneself to the help of others.

This spring has had a hard birth, in so many ways, but there are warmer and better days ahead. Thank you for being a steady strand in the net. Your friendship means more than I can say.

Yours,

Kate

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Motherhood is not a competition

Read Reva’s last letter here.

March 9, 2015

My desk

Dear Reva,

It’s been a wild week around here as we all get organized for our first March Break vacation as a newly constituted family of three. Or not exactly three, because my parents have decided that this is the year to take everyone to Disney, which means that the entire Hilton clan (youngest member aged 6 weeks) is heading to Orlando on the weekend. It will be crazy and exhausting and distracting and warm. And I can’t wait.

I’m feeling better, thanks. Another February is over, and we are all still standing. This is cause for celebration, and a ritual burning of Palo Santo wood (thanks for that, too).

You asked in your last letter about depression. I’ve had it since I was a teenager, although I wasn’t diagnosed until my late twenties (while articling at a law firm, not coincidentally). My own terror of mental illness prevented me from getting treatment for many years, and one of my few regrets in life is that I wasted so much time pretending that I was perfectly fine. Even still, I told very few people during my high-powered career years, and during my marriage. Self-employment as a writer and marital separation have been very freeing in this sense, as the consequences of external disapproval are relatively minimal.

And speaking of external disapproval, let’s talk about motherhood.

I’d love to hear more about what your ‘good mother’ looks like. I think we all come to motherhood with a factory setting, a series of built-in expectations that we’ve imported from our own families, and created in opposition to our own families, and absorbed from the culture around us (The Cosby Show, ironically, springs to mind).

I happen to think that any mother who provides the necessaries of life (food, shelter, clothing), and who makes her children feel loved and safe, is a ‘good mother’. Does anyone seriously disagree with me on this point? No? In that case, I think we should stop beating ourselves up over the things we believe we are failing at as parents (cooking perfect family meals seven nights a week, producing musical prodigies, organizing elaborate camping trips) and celebrate the things we do well.

For example, I don’t ski. I don’t like skiing. I don’t like the cold. I don’t like driving for hours in bad weather to find a place where it is even possible to ski in the flatlands of Ontario. But I’m Canadian, so for a long time I obsessed over the idea that my children should learn to ski. I looked into programs for them, and tried to encourage my kids to sign up for them. But you know what? They aren’t interested in skiing (or in hockey, for that matter). Call it nature, call it nurture, it doesn’t matter. They are Canadian children who don’t ski (or play hockey).

So be it. They like reading, and I care more about that.

I love being a mother of sons. I grew up in a house of girls, one of three sisters, and went to a girls’ school and a girls’ camp, so my parenting has an anthropological quality sometimes. Have you seen Boyhood yet? You must. It is stunning for many reasons, one of which is the emergence, in real time, of a man from the body of a boy. But it also captures the depth of a relationship between a mother and her son, and suggests, eloquently, that you can make a lot of mistakes as a parent and still produce great kids, just by being a steady and loving presence in their lives. It’s wistful and heartbreaking and harrowing and comforting, all at the same time – not a bad description of motherhood itself, come to think of it.

Motherhood is not a competition. It’s a relationship. To be a good mother, you need to use what is best in you – your strengths, your talents, your joys – to cultivate a relationship that brings out the best in your children. Focus on what you love and do well and let the rest go.

Have a great March Break.

Yours,

Kate

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Finding Your Path

February 16, 2015

Toronto

Dear Reva,

When I was in University, I had an incredible summer job as an intern at a big publishing house in Toronto. Incredible, not because it paid well, but because it took me inside the beating heart of book production, and books were and always had been my one true love.

Among other tasks, like operating the postage machine, I managed the ‘slush pile’, the name we gave to the ever-growing stack of unsolicited manuscripts that required a cursory review and response. This was, of course, back in the days before email submissions. We had an imaginary Acquisitions Editor, whose name I cannot reveal even to this day, and aspiring authors would write long letters to him, and I would reply. Sometimes they would phone him, but he was always in a meeting.

Knee-deep in the slush pile one day, I was graced by a visit from the Editor-in-Chief, a brilliant and glamorous woman of whom I was entirely in awe. She asked about my progress. At that moment, I was drafting a rejection letter to an aspiring author in Iroquois Falls, who had penned a god-awful bodice-ripper (understand that I am not opposed to bodice-rippers in principle, but this one was ghastly). Radiating positivity, I said something along the lines of: “I think it’s wonderful that so many people write, even if it ends up being just for themselves.” And she wisely replied: “People don’t write just for themselves. Everybody writes so that someone else will read it.”

And now that I’m a writer I can tell you she was absolutely right. We write because we are skilled at it, and because it gives us intense pleasure to line up the right words in the right order on the page, but mostly we write because we understand that the whole point of this business of living is to connect with other people, and the written word remains one of the most powerful connective tools ever devised.

You asked a great question in your last letter about drive and expectations. I’m going to defer that one to my next letter, as I want to think about it a bit more.

I will, however, take a stab at the question about how we know when it’s time to make a significant change in our professional lives. In doing so, I’m going to reveal a secret addiction. Here it is: I love Convocation speeches. I’m serious. I watch them on YouTube. And recently, I watched a Convocation speech by Neil Gaiman to a bunch of undergraduate Arts students, and it was fabulous.

In his speech, he talks about never having had a career plan, but rather an overarching life goal, which in his case was to make (eventually) a living as a writer of fiction. He imagined that goal as a mountain in the distance, and evaluated every career decision he made by asking whether it took him closer to the mountain or farther away.

I love this metaphor. The mountain can be a specific job, but it can also be a set of professional aspirations, because often, even though we can’t identify the exact job we want, we can nevertheless describe the qualities that our ideal job ought to have (self-supporting, creative, in the public interest, international, and so on). And the idea of the mountain allows for this indeterminacy, because it permits many possible paths. The point is that you can be as non-linear as you need to be, as long as your path is moving you towards the mountain in the distance.

I’ve met so many people who struggle with professional dissatisfaction. Sometimes, the issue is that they genuinely don’t know what job would make them happy. These people (to play with the mountain metaphor) can see a whole range on the horizon, and they are overwhelmed. They know they have the ability to reach any one of the individual mountains in the range, but they are paralyzed by choice.

Other people know exactly which mountain they want to reach, but they don’t believe they can get there. The perceived risk of walking towards the mountain, of declaring themselves, is too great. Maybe they don’t believe they have enough talent to reach the mountain, or enough support from the people around them. Maybe they suspect that the cost of the journey will be too high, because it will disrupt the stability of core relationships in their lives. And they may be right. Or not.

We can’t know. This seems like a bad thing from the perspective of people who like control, but it isn’t, necessarily. This is the road to a bigger life: the step out into the unknown, beyond the comfortable and the safe, beyond the things we already know we can do.

Whatever path you choose, I know there will be something amazing on it for you.

Yours,

Kate

Link to Reva’s last letter: http://www.revaseth.com/penpalproject/reality-bites/

Reva’s response to this letter: http://www.revaseth.com/penpalproject/february-blues/

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