I actually haven't written a letter of any kind in quite awhile.

My newly written letter needed to be filed. I actually hadn't filed a letter for longer than I had written one. The lady the used to file our letters passed away in May; her filing system had been neglected. She would file the letters by the month in which they were written and she would keep the most recent months on the floor by her desk.

I went to the cabinet and noticed that the files stopped a February. I went back to her desk and found March, April and May, all undisturbed in the little rack on the floor. She was rather consistent, a manila file folder for each month marked with an orange label. After a month's file was three months old she would place it in the file cabinet to sit in a hanging file with a neatly typed year month year.

Seeing how it was August, I had some file folders to prepare. I went to the supply room looking for orange labels and found none, so I just grabbed some manila files and hanging file.

I sat at her desk and looked through the drawers for the orange labels. I found a package with one partially used sheet of labels left, enough to get me to September. I turned on her type writing and put the white labels in for the hanging files and tried to type. Only faint letters appeared on the labels. I replaced the ribbon and started again, this time with the labels facing the right direction. I had put then in upside right but in a typewriter you need to put then upside down.

I actually haven't used a typewriter in over a decade. It took a moment for me to get my bearings but I typed enough corresponding labels to get me through all the months I needed, plus one.

I used to be a fair typist, a little slow but things would be lined up expertly; another skill mostly unneeded and mostly forgotten.


"You can type?" surprisingly he asked.

"Hell, yeah. I can sew too."