Where I Get It From...

Love Letter 

It's a late night or perhaps an early morning. I'm sitting here. A song is playing that brings to mind the thoughts I have while gazing at a pair of pictures alongside a love letter written by my grandmother, Senora to my grandfather, Virgil. The song is called "Coming From Where I'm From." I'm lovin it not only because the singer possesses a deeply rich, southern voice but also because I've heard these words directed at me a few times both as a question and a statement. Where do you come from? How do you come about your ideas for love? What makes you think the way you do?

I'm reading this love letter written by my grandmother and it makes me smile. Her handwriting and the words she chooses look to me as though she struggled a bit, trying to find the right way to say what was on her mind. She wanted to convey a message of love and to assure my grandfather that he was truly the man of her dreams. She thanks him for convincing her to go away to school. I take it they weren't really "official" at the time she wrote this confession of love on September 4, 1933. She goes on to remind him how he joked with her about going away to learn to speak "better english" but then when she'd return, she might not want anything to do with him. She closed the letter with these words leaving him and me with no doubts as to how she felt about Virgil. "I'm coming back to make you my one and only..."

Where do I come from? How do I come about my ideas for love? What makes me think the way that I do? Right now all I can do is smile, point to the heavens and continue to groove off of this slowjam for a little while longer. I'm blessed to come from where I'm from and nothing or no one in my life thus far can make that feeling less true. The sad part is that someone actually tried to do just that...