By Denise Stoughton Special thanks to The Seattle Times
“Editor’s note: Pacific NW magazine’s weekly Backstory provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the writer’s process or an extra tidbit that accompanies our cover story. This week’s cover story explores the fabulously creative (and personal) mailboxes of Bainbridge Island.
I WAS IN MY 40s — well after the advent of spell check and autocorrect — when I realized “eachother” was not one word, or even a word at all. Until then, I routinely had ignored the corrections and chalked them up to a bug in the system, inexplicably unable to accept “each other” over “eachother.”
If you could read my eighth-grade compositions, I’m sure you’d find multiple examples of “eachother,” which I find painfully heartbreaking because that eighth-grader lived in a severely dysfunctional and broken home, unaware she was a mere year away from becoming homeless. I can only imagine my word grouping “mistake” came from an unconscious longing for wholeness.
Even now, I tend toward childlike wishful thinking. Like: Wouldn’t it be great if we could all just get along? I’ve wished it more than ever these past few years, when everyone (one word) seems divided on just about everything.
In our current times, it’s easy to be cynical. Still, seeing the world as I do, I latched on (in the manner of grasping a life preserver) to a small detail within my purview: the carefully crafted, creative mailboxes in the community where I live.
The mailboxes make me happy and hopeful; they stirred a longing deep in my psyche, filling a need for optimism and faith in my fellow humans.” – Denise Stoughton via The Seattle Times – Click here to read more!