Renderings from readers stir emotions

Over the years, readers have written to tell me they like some columns more than others – I can understand that. I like some readers more than others.

Especially the ones, like the Appleton man who wrote this week, who say we are “kindred souls.” Neither he nor I have watched “Survivor,” “Temptation Island” or “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire,” and he doesn’t intend to start anytime soon. Ditto.

On another note about another column, this writer says it gives him a great amount of satisfaction every fall when he finishes stacking his winter wood in the shed. At 76, he says, it is “getting harder and harder to do … Maybe one more year.”

He says to keep up the good work. I say the same thing to him.

Although readers and columnists rarely meet, we are not strangers. And if we’re lucky, there can be a connection mutually enjoyable.

Such is the case with an Orono reader with whom, one of these days, I hope to share a chat and a cup of tea. She responded to a column about proud, independent, elderly women because she is one of them and because she knows many of them. “I am talking about the strong women over 70, over 80, and some over 90 … mostly living alone, but cherishing every precious moment,” she writes. Describing the many activities that fill her days, she says, “The fact that we now have time to do all these enriching things helps make up for the loneliness of losing our life-partners.”

That is one letter I’ll keep. It surely beats the ones from the hairdressers who were offended by a column on my Aunt Francis’ beauty shop that smelled of permanent wave solution and cigarettes.

Or the irate letter from the retired English professor in Searsport who chastised me for “fragmented sentences, sloppiness, non-thinking and error-filled writing.”

Mistakes invariably prompt reader response, such as this one from a Hancock friend about a column on the generation gap: “I have one caveat with your column …. In my lexicon, yogurt existed for eons -actually when I was a little girl growing up in Shanghai, there was a little Russian snack shop in the French Concession and yogurt is all they served – some, salted and peppered with radishes and scallions chopped up in it. I preferred the yogurt with strawberry jam on top.”

That same column brought a long letter from an 82-year-old reader in Greenville Junction who enclosed her own column that had been published in the Moosehead paper. She wrote about the “old days” of the 20th century when gas was 9 cents a gallon, stamps cost 3 cents, and a dish was something you ate out of, not something on a roof.

Several readers have enjoyed columns about songs, particularly hymns remembered from childhood. From Hirundo Wildlife Refuge in Old Town came a note about the lovely “In the Bleak Mid-Winter,” and from a Waterville reader, a list of hymns of thanks I had neglected to mention in a Thanksgiving column. The reader is hearing-impaired but remembers when she was not … and when she sang the beloved songs in her church choir.

One of the nicest letters came last week from another “kindred soul” on Mount Desert Island who sent along her little blue book of poetry I will cherish.

“I realize that most folks would rather kiss a chicken on the lips than read a poem,” she writes, “but I’m determined to find a few converts here and there. I sent a book to John Gould in his assisted living quarters, and his wife wrote that he really enjoyed it, as did she. The reception I get from others makes me glow, so it’s all worthwhile.”

I know just what she means.