Memories

It has been a perfect day for gardening, bright and breezy, and not too hot. We have both achieved quite a bit.
In between times we are irresistably drawn to a shoebox of letters we came across last week when Normous was clearing out a shelf in the cupboard. These 95 letters were written by me to N's parents when we lived in Nairobi, Kenya from 1972 to 1974. My mother-in-law numbered the envelopes and put them in a shoebox.
When we went to Kenya, Anna was 7 and Jeremy was 4. The letters are a weekly account of these formative years and from time to time the children wrote or dictated letters to their grandparents whom they missed very much. They were very homesick. There are happy descriptions of excursions out into the Kenyan game parks, of visits into Nairobi town to buy exotic fabrics from the Asian shops, and accounts of life as an ex-pat Shell wife. I didn't really enjoy having a Kipsigi houseboy with loops in his ears, but we liked Shem the gardener who washed the car and cleaned our shoes every morning before we were up!
Reading the letters has brought back so many memories of this time in our life. There is another bundle of letters that I wrote home to my own mother in 1965 and 1966 when we lived in Venezuela with baby Anna. Norman has already started on these, but I have yet to finish Kenya!