The Letters...

Dear 2017, Lucky Seven was once how I felt Seven. There’s a reason I chose that number. I was seven years old. I was born in the seventh month. I was given a gift at a party that never actually happened because I was very ill with childhood asthma and the whole event was called off. One of the parents dropped in a gift from a school chum in a small box and on a miserable day it made me feel a heck of a lot better. Inside was a tiny necklace featuring a small ladybird on a gold chain, the seven spotted ladybird. There was a card wishing me better luck next time in large clumsy writing. There was a hand drawn picture, a garden full of colour and optimism. The next year I had a mad hatters party, from memory, and my hat featured a huge garden scene all around the brim, bursting into life. This time the party did happen. Whether the charm was lucky or the mind and hearts will for it to be so, made it so, next year was better. I think of that theory as rooted in science too not just so

Dear Ms Nixie, I’ve come back to tell you I could fly. I’ve also come back to tell you that I made it my business to study crawling too. I suppose there was something about both I wanted to capture and well, I couldn’t quite make up my mind which of the two felt more free and which way I would rather be, on the ground, steady steady, hobbling forwards, or soaring through the air in full glide. It’s come to pass from where I am, on the space time continuum, that you have been a Time Tourist from the early years and that you have found, true as gold, a window to the fourth dimension via some sort of four dimensional geometric equation and a time travelling device. I wanted to welcome you back to anywhere between 1904 and 2000, my life. You’re always welcome and perhaps you could bring back to the here and now a little of my legacy, for the ocean, for women in science, for those who seek freedom. Yours Truly, Ila Loetscher Dearest Ila, My goodness, from the deepest an

Dear Ms Nixie, I was wondering if you could help me? I have a mouth but do not eat. I have a bed but do not sleep. I always run but never walk. I murmur but never talk. I have a head but never weep. I have a bank but never store money. I have found myself besotted with the ocean and fear rivers aren’t nearly as influential. Would you have any pointers? There’s just so many other beautiful rivers and fertile deltas, all of them wanting to end up at one prize location….ocean side. You see I’m also not a perfect river. I’m not some little streak of a stream, slender and bubbling in the brook of youth. Oh there’s been times of drought when I gave that look a good go but then oh, the rain, the rain, so sweet a drop to swell the edges and call the curves to greater life. Oh I’m no grand Mississippi by all means but I have tributaries that search for the touch of that wild, beautiful, free heart. I wait presently day by day, as an inlet, for the rain, for the gorgeous storms, to take me