Sat outside on the porch this afternoon. The sky looks melancholy and sad today, marbled with grays and white and a few dashes of blue. I wonder if the sky is mourning for the sunny hot days of summer. Fall is upon us and the leaves are starting to put on their cool weather colors, softly floating to the ground when the wind rattles their branches, gathering around the tree trunks and coloring the sidewalks. I love to hear them crunch when I walk on them. The acorns will be falling soon. I’ll hear them like shotgun pellets on my neighbor’s tin roof. When the blows fiercely, the acorns dropping from the branches sound like the Gunfight from the O.K. Corral.

My street doesn’t have much color in the trees yet but I noticed when I went to town this morning the maples and hickories and chokeberries have started to color up. My street has huge water oaks and their changing yellow leaves look like blotches of sunshine here and there amongst the green leaves. The dogwoods across the street were the first to put on their scarlet hues.

I miss the huge sweetgum tree on my driveway in Alexander City. That tree was so beautiful flaunting itself in the fall, painted in yellows and oranges and purples and reds. The leaves looked like Mother Nature just dipped her brush in all the shades of her artist’s palette and let the colors bleed together. I loved putting branches of them on the dinner table. And can’t forget the beautiful little Japanese maple in my front yard. When she put on her crimson ball gown, and the sun filtered down through her branches, she was the most beautiful belle in the yard.

Been thinking about letters today. Gonna go upstairs tomorrow and read through a shoe box or two of letters I received in college. Letters are defined as a written message from one person to another, usually put in an envelope and sent by post. I love letters but with my wrists and fingers hurting with arthritis I usually type my letters and then write the address on the envelope. If I wrote the letter in longhand you wouldn’t be able to read it. I can’t read my notes sometimes if too much time has passed since I scribbled them down.

I sent my nephew a letter yesterday, he’s a sophomore at Auburn University, and enclosed a small folded banknote. My mother used to send me a twenty dollar bill occasionally in letters she wrote me when I was attending Wesleyan College. That twenty dollars could take me and three friends out for pizza and Cokes with enough left over to tip. I don’t think twenty dollars would buy a large pizza now.

My cousin told me our grandmother sent her a $5 bill occasionally when she was at Auburn University and she’d treat her friends to Krystals’ cheeseburgers and a box of Krispy Kreme donuts. I just paid $12 for a box of Krispy Kreme donuts. Maybe my nephew can buy a gallon of gas! It’s amazing what things cost now. I live on a shoe string budget but rising grocery prices are raveling the threads of my string. Maybe we all need to raise a pig and a cow, get a flock of chickens, and plant a garden.

Letters are such treasures when loved ones have left us. I have several shoe boxes of letters from my years in college. My high school friends, my sisters-in-law, my high school boyfriend’s mother, my mother, my daddy, and my grandmother Lane filled my mailbox with letters all four years. Hardly a day passed that I didn’t receive a letter. My brothers wrote letters home, too, from their years at the University of Alabama. Funny, we just never called each other on the phone, we wrote letters back and forth.

When I moved to Alexander City, Mama and I started our letter writing again. I love to read the letters I wrote her with all the news about my children. I’ve also had family members as pen pals and I’ve got a steady letter writing gig with my friend, Boss Lady.

I can see God making us his living letters. Our lives are a letter, written by God, but read daily by others. When we are faithful Christians, expressing our faith through our words and deeds, and have Christ written on our hearts, those who read us not only see us but see God brought to life through our daily actions.

“The act of writing is like an act of love. There is contact. There is exchange too. We no longer know whether the words come out of the ink onto the page, or whether they emerge from the page itself where they were sleeping, the ink merely giving them color,” — George Rodenbach.