Too Busy?

 Good morning, Faithful Friday Fiction Fans,

    It's a cloudy, damp, cool spring morning here. The birds are going crazy, especially the starlings. Everything is very green and if we'd have a few days of sunshine everything would probably grow like crazy. 

    This week I actually wrote 1k words in one day! Of course I haven't written since then, but it's a start. And sorry, it wasn't on "Phil Wood." About 600 words were on "Lawrence & Lenexa" and the other 400 were on another short story that I had started and had forgotten about. But it's a start. At least I wrote. I'm hoping I'll get some more written tonight. You can pray I'll be motivated because I just haven't felt motivated at all.

    I have decided to keep this blog going since I have new readers who haven't read everything. :) If you follow by email though, you may have to find a different way to follow since blogger is getting rid of that option come July. Perhaps there's another way I'll be able to have a "follow by email." If any of you know of any options, let me know.

    Oh, I do have a story that would take 14 weeks to post, should I post it? I could possibly break it up with some other one-week posts.

     Today's story is one I wrote specifically for a friend to read to a class she was teaching. I'll let you figure out the meaning of it. 

 

Too Busy?

    Jessie McDonald opened the mailbox and pulled out the mail. Eagerly she flipped through it. “Oh, there’s a letter here from Cindy!” she exclaimed in delight. “I wonder what she has to say today.”
    Quickly entering the house, Jessie dropped the rest of the mail on the table and tore open her letter. Cindy was such a good friend, always ready to listen to Jessie’s problems and help in many ways. She offered good advice, had wonderful stories to tell, and Jessie knew she could always count on her friend’s wisdom.
    After quickly reading the letter, Jessie sighed. “She’s such a good writer,” she thought, carrying her letter to her room where she dropped it on her desk and promptly forgot about it as the phone rang.

    The following day brought another letter from Cindy, but Jessie was in a hurry and only had time to rip open the envelope and glance at a few lines. “I’ll read the rest as soon as I get home,” she promised herself. This letter, stuffed carelessly back in its envelope, was tossed onto the couch before she left the house.
    But when she returned home later in the day, she was tired, and the thought of reading Cindy’s letter didn’t sound as much fun as reading a mystery book. So the letter remained unread on the couch and eventually slipped between the cushions.

    “If I didn’t have to clean the house,” Jessie said when another letter arrived from her friend, “I’d read Cindy’s letter. Oh, well. I can read it later.” But later never seemed to arrive that day, for Jessie was busy with one thing or another and the letter lay unopened on her desk.

    There was no letter over the weekend and when the mailman delivered the mail on Monday, Jessie hurried out to get it. Inside the mailbox, a lovely red envelope caught her eye. It had an intricate design embossed around the edges and her name was written in a flowing, swirling font. “Oh,” breathed Jessie, realizing that it was from Cindy. “This is so lovely, it would be a shame to mess it up.” Gently she ran her fingers over the edges and then turned the envelope over in her hand. “I won’t open it yet,” she decided. “I’ll enjoy the lovely envelope a while longer.” Carrying it inside and into her room, Jessie set the red envelope in a prominent place on her desk and stood for several minutes admiring it. “I just love the color red. Some friends are coming over this afternoon, won’t they be jealous when they see this!” She knew that Cindy also wrote to several other friends, and a desire to have them see what a lovely envelope she had received came over her. Picking up the treasured bit of paper, she carried it out and propped it up on an end table in the living room where it would be sure to catch the eyes of her coming visitors. So delighted was she with the cover of the letter, that never once since she had come inside had she thought of wondering what Cindy had written inside the lovely envelope.
    The envelope brought several comments from Jessie’s friends as she knew it would. The talk for some time was about Cindy and what she was doing and what she had said. Jessie, because she hadn’t taken time to read the letters which she had received, could only listen and comment. At first this embarrassed her, but then she shrugged it off. She shouldn’t be expected to know as much as some of the others. After all, she assured herself, no one else was as busy as she was.

    The letter stood on the end table for several days, drawing admiring glances from Jessie and her friends who stopped by. Each day she dusted around it, but she never opened it.

    When the next letter arrived, Jessie noticed it wasn’t such a bright envelope and, thinking about the other unread letters, she ripped it open before going inside. She could tell this new letter would take a while to read as there were many pages and the writing was small. “I will put it by my bed,” she decided. “That way I can read it tonight.”
    Jessie’s intentions were good, but after a busy day, all she wanted to do was crawl between her sheets and sleep. In the morning a stack of books were placed on the nightstand, and Cindy’s letter was mistakenly covered up.
    And so things went for several weeks. Jessie had good intentions about reading her friend’s letters, but she was busy and forgot later, or she lost them. One time she fell asleep reading one at night and crumpled up the sheets so badly that she decided never again would she read the letters at night.

    One day, as Jessie sat on the porch steps waiting for the mailman, a friend’s car stopped in front of her house. “Hi, Joey. Hi, Nicole,” she called. “What are you two doing here?”
    “Just wanted to make sure you were all right,” Nicole answered, coming up the walk with Joey.
    “Yeah,” Joey added, “when you weren’t there we thought you must be sick.” He stopped before her.
    Jessie looked as confused as she felt. “What are you talking about? I’m not sick. Where should I have been?”
    Her friends looked at each other. Then Joey asked, “Didn’t you read Cindy’s letters?”
    And Nicole added, “She’s talked about her visit for quite some time now. Today was the day and she planned a party for us all.”
    “It was a great time! I wish you could have made it,” Joey put in.
    For several minutes Jessie sat in silence staring at her friends. “Cindy here, in town,” she gasped, “and I missed out on seeing her!” She swallowed hard and blinked back tears. “It was because I almost never made the time to read her letters. I didn’t know she was coming.”

    After Nicole and Joey left, Jessie sat in thoughtful silence on the porch steps. “I couldn’t  know what Cindy planned because I never cared enough to read her letters! Never again will I make the same mistake. As soon as her letter arrives, I’m going to take the time right then to read it.”
    So diligent has Jessie become in reading Cindy’s letters, that there is no danger of her ever missing any event Cindy plans again and their friendship grew. In fact, Jessie soon was so well acquainted with what Cindy was doing and what she thought about different things, that even Nicole and Joey started to ask Jessie for news of their friend.

Has your spring been wet this year?

Do you want me to start posting the longer story?

Did you figure out what this story means?