Before starting this letter, Dart was looking at a “couple of clothes-horses” in Life magazine. “My only sentiment is that they must pick girls with homely faces so people will have to look at the clothes, if they look at the pictures at all.” I think he’s so enamored with Dot’s pretty face that every other female pales in comparison.
Still no working furnace, so it’s going to be a frigid weekend in the Peterson household.
Although he spared himself criticism the other day, he makes up for it here. “I am not only gutless, but stupid, lazy, and spineless. I know darn well I should do schoolwork, yet I fritter my time away terribly and it all piles up at the last minute, and then some of it doesn’t get done. I speak here in reference to Spanish and English. I’m so mad at myself I could slap my wrist. Bah!”
He tells her the only thing he’s sure of these days is that he loves her and misses her. He hasn’t been able to get her off his mind at all today, even if he had wanted to, even when he should. As disappointed as he is that she isn’t able to come out for a visit, he knows it’s for the best. He wants to see her and be with her more than he can describe, “and that’s where the danger lies. I’m afraid of what might happen if you should come. With Mom and Pop both working, I know there’d be times when we’d be alone in the house . Sometimes I think of those times with sorrow for what might have been, if we’d been able to see each other, and with fear for what might have come from it.”
He continues, “Darling, I want you, and along with all your wonderful ideas and your buoying cheer, and your consideration, and your love for me, I want *** and !!!, and I want them all, just as soon as we can decently and honorably share them all, without a trace of remorse.”
He was happy to get her eight-page letter today, but it was the last paragraph where she described how much she missed him that put him in this mood and is responsible for the contents of this letter.
With fondness, he recalls all the little silent signals they send to each other when they are together; a look, a sigh, a little squeeze in the midst of a bigger one. There must be 1,000 ways they converse without words. Sometimes her simple sentences have the same effect when he reads between the lines and picks up the meaning she didn’t put on paper. When that happens, he just about goes wild with missing her.
He wonders if the pain and irregularity she suffers monthly may have been exacerbated by her inflamed appendix. He’s read such things can effect each other. He certainly hopes her monthly struggles will ease up a bit after all this. He wishes he knew for sure that she was alright.
He also hopes it’s been okay to write about such personal things tonight. He feels if they can’t talk, they must write. At the bottom of the page, in tiny, tidy draftsman-style printing, he asks her again to tell him all about her surgery; the prep, the anesthesia, how many stitches, all the morbid details. He also sends his love, of course.