only american english please
Last time I was in Ireland, my mother gave me some letters to read. They were written to her parents in England when we were children. My grandparents had saved them for her and returned them neatly filed in folders and dated. When we left home, it was a sort of mother’s eye-view record of our childhood and since my parents were both prolific and witty letter writers, they made wonderfully entertaining reading. I was absorbed in them for hours, transported back to marvellous afternoons imaginatively whiled away in our playroom with my siblings and friends. There we invented many of our own games and acted out all sorts of dramas for whatever audience we could entrap, usually my poor mother of course. She writes, for example, about us being inspired for months by a Christmas trip to the operetta The Mikado. We put on an excellent show, which included costumes and props. Our mother made sure we always had plenty of things that with a little skill and imagination could be turned into nearly anything. She passed on to us old bedspreads and blankets, odd ear-rings, gloves and socks, pieces of leftover materials and jumble sale acquisitions. This particular show became a classic with our drama company, so much so that the next door neighbour presented us with a recording of The Pirates of Penzance, hoping it, too, would catch our fancy and give him a break from ‘Three Little Maids from School are We’ floating melodically but all too frequently through his wall. It was fun reading their version of an event which I remember happening, also interesting to note how different my memories are from their descriptions. On a more solemn note, I found there were many things going on that we as children were unaware of, since my parents wanted to protect us from whatever we might find worrying or unpleasant. It was only by reading those letters that I realised how many problems my parents had to deal with and appreciated the amount of thinking and care they put into our upbringing. Through the letters I also discovered interesting views on some people which I only knew as a child, but never saw much of when I grew up. For instance, we used to look forward to visits from a specially eccentric family friend, because we found him very odd and entertaining. My mother used to dread them. Apparently, with an adult’s perspective, his oddities were somewhat less amusing. As a result of this experience I am freshly converted to the advantages of letter writing. I too live abroad and have children. I do write to my mother every now and then, but I must say that I give in all too frequently to the immediacy of a quick telephone call. My mother saves my letters as hers did and my children could enjoy a nostalgic afternoon, buried in childhood memories one day. As my mother says, a phone call is over as soon as you hang up, but you can read a letter over and over again.
Probably because there were few commas, I ran out of breath mid-sentence several times. Also, I changed the "marvelous" and "realize" to their US spellings.