28 April 2020
Dear Alice,
First off, I miss you. You and your family made my semester so great, and I can’t believe our time together ended so suddenly. I know you probably don’t understand this yet, but I’m actually a little bit thankful that we didn’t know that when I left the last time I was over, I wouldn’t be able to come back for a while. That would have been a hard day for the both of us, instead of one of our normal fun days. I’m writing to you about a scary time, but I want to remind you about all the good things that might have happened while we all had to stay home.
I hope that you’ve enjoyed having your mom home during the day now that she’s teaching her class from home. Hopefully you and Elliot are finding ways to entertain your dad while she’s busy working. I know that you’ve been filling your time reading books, painting on the floor, playing with your babies and your fairies, running outside with your imaginary friends, and probably making a mess. I hope your dad has had time to work on all his projects that he’s been building for you and your brother, but I bet he misses having me there to play with you while he does.
One of my favorite things about you, Alice, is that you always asked me what I was doing for the rest of the day, and I had better have had a good excuse for not being able to stay at your house with you all day. I wanted to share with you some of the things that I have been doing while I haven’t been able to spend my time with you. Like I’m sure you have been doing, I have been reading lots of books and painting lots of pictures. I do have to say, I enjoy reading your Berenstain Bears books more than I enjoy reading my school books. “Working” (yes, believe it or not, this was my job) with you gave me escape from my world at college, and I sure miss that escape from the world right now. You have quite the imagination, so I know you have come up with hundreds of different possibilities of what’s going on in the world right now. And knowing you, all of them are happy imaginations. Maybe you can’t go outside to see your neighbors and your friends from school because they are all away at a wedding across the world, or maybe you aren’t going outside right now because you have to stay home to protect your babies from getting sick (since I can’t come play doctor and heal them for a while), especially Mama Leopard, he has a lot of kids to take care of too. I hope that you hold on to these happy imaginations as long as you can. By the time you are able to read this by yourself, hopefully this time will just be a memory, but use this letter as a way to remember that you can get through anything, even if it takes escaping to a made-up world for a little while — that’s something you’ve helped me remember. Keep being a light in this world.
Whatever you have been doing since our last day together, I hope you are still having so much fun. Hopefully all this craziness goes away and we can play together again soon.
I miss you,
Nana Sara (or sometimes just Sara, still not sure which one I was)