06/08/2026
This week's columns: a full spotlight!
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~ Reflections ~
By Richard Weber
Reflections is a series of stories portraying life and the experience of living in Ellis. Rich hopes to inspire and lift people up while revisiting old memories, taking a look at the lessons he and his wife, Jan, learned along the way.
Love Letters
“The memory of our courting days that is most alive to me is the letters we wrote that summer.” --Jan
I wrote my first love letter to Jan on December 5, five weeks after our first date. Why I wrote that letter needs some explaining since we were both taking classes at Fort Hays and spending a lot of time together.
Love is a word that was never spoken in our house when I was growing up. As a result, I was embarrassed to tell Jan that I loved her.
This was not uncommon in families back then and many people today still find it hard to show their affection. Leo Buscaglia taught a love class at the University of Southern California and one day he gave his class an assignment. The students had to approach the people they valued most and tell them how much they “truly loved and appreciated them.”
The students found the assignment difficult. Buscaglia writes: “Most of the students were lovingly tongue tied. They felt ill at ease, awkward, even embarrassed by expressing their love.”
That was how I felt when I tried to tell Jan that I loved her. I was madly in love with her but I was too embarrassed to say it, so I wrote a letter instead.
Except I was too embarrassed to even write it. The word love appears nowhere in that letter, and that was the whole purpose of the letter.
And yet, I did succeed in saying something important about love. I told Jan how she inspired me and how I respected her. I wrote about trust and commitment and how I wanted to know everything about her. I wanted her to be as happy as I was, and I said I would always be there for her.
That letter was a love contract, and Jan signed it at Christmas break with a letter of her own.
We continued to write each other off and on through the Spring semester and the letter writing took off in earnest when we went home for summer vacation. We wrote as often as two or three times a week because we could only see each other on weekends.
Letters had two advantages over phone calls. It only cost five cents to send a letter back then and the letters preserved our privacy which we did
not have on the family phone. Jan locked my letters in an old jewelry box “to keep from prying eyes.”
Receiving a letter from Jan was like getting a gift wrapped in an enveloped, a precious gift of words crafted with love. They took me on a magical journey into her most intimate thoughts and feelings. It was almost like having her there with me.
I waited anxiously for every letter and I read them like I never read anything before. I read every word, read between the lines, put the letter down, came back and read it again. Jan did the same with my letters. We could not wait to see what beautiful things the other had written.
Our letters served as an important bonding agent through the summer and we discussed some problems in those letters that were not so easy to talk about on a date. Though we were living miles apart, Jan was never far from my thoughts nor I from hers.
Jan had no trouble saying she loved me and it did not take long to get over my embarrassment. Two days after that first letter, I sent her another letter. In the middle of a blank page I wrote five words: “Jan, I love you. Rich”
After that I could not say it often enough and Jan could not have been more pleased to hear it. She wrote, “I think those three little words ‘I love you’ sound more beautiful than any poem or song that I ever heard.”
It sounded beautiful to me too.
Read this column in this week's Review!
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