Today is May 8. My parents were married on May 8 in 1954. It was a cold spring day, like today.

Although they went to high school together, they never dated until years later. Their first date was in September of 1953. My mother was living with her parents in Athol, MA both of my parents' home town. My father had just enrolled in the Harvard Business School and was living in Cambridge.

The year of their long distance dating, my mother wrote many letters to my father, which his mother, Flora, apparently saved in a box with all the letters of his lifetime. 

From this original letter, written in the early season of their dating, I made a found poem into a palimpsest. It's included in my chapbook, Tree of the Apple. What I love about my mother's letter is how it foreshadows their everlasting, often tumultuous, relationship, through all its slippery seasons, for over fifty years of marriage.