NaNoWriMo - More than a Labor of Love

I really don't think I'm imagining the sensitivity I seem to have to the black mold from the letters.  After shuffling through the stack yesterday morning, my throat was raw from the effects...but oh, the finds!!  Letters from Harold, Marvin, and Walt...oh, my!  The question is, do I use them?  Are they relevant enough to the story to further risking my health to sort and transcribe?  The letters from Grandma's girlfriends (Velma, Nadyne, and Inez) are also in the stack and could shed more light on the subject depending on how much Grandma wrote to them about her love interests.

The letters from Harold were from the fall of 1924...grandma would've been starting her junior year in high school.  While I only found five letters from Harold (and he didn't have the best grasp of grammar, spelling, and punctuation), there were a couple of sentences that seriously cracked me up:

"This town sure is the snails antennae for excitement.  All a guy can do is drink and fight or else stick up the bank, and I don't believe they'd wake up then enough to make it interesting."

There were a number of letters from Marvin who seemed to be just as enamored of Grandma as Grandpa was, and the time frame of those letters overlapped with the correspondence between Grandma and Grandpa.  Was Grandma working on securing a "second" in the event Grandpa didn't return from California?  What if Grandpa hadn't returned from California?  I wouldn't be here blogging about it, that's for certain!

Then there was the summer of 1926 after Grandma graduated from high school that she spent with family in North Carolina.  I found several letters written back and forth between Grandpa in Iowa to Grandma in North Carolina.

The letter from Walt in the fall of 1928 is the puzzler, though.  By then, Grandma and Grandpa had come through some of their insecurities and trust issues and seemed to have formed a more solid bond.  So who was Walt? And why did I only find one letter from him?  I haven't read the letter, but I absolutely fell in love with his penmanship...it's just oozing scholarly romanticism.

TOTAL WORD COUNT = 22,705

Grandpa with Nadyne