Hidden Treasure
When I was young, we had all these family photos on the wall over our fireplace. It was a collection of family past and present punctuated by a macaroni seahorse my sister had painted in kindergarten. Our family room was a converted garage and sometimes when a door slammed just right, the pictures shook and readjusted crooked.
In the frame behind the picture of my mother’s grandmother, something was revealed. It was a silver certificate. A dollar bill from years past. It was the first dollar her grandmother had ever made. My mother had told me that her grandmother told her when she was young, “Always save the first dollar you ever make, that way you will never be broke.”
I was more struck by the idea of hiding something behind a photograph than I was interested in the money. I loved the idea of finding something that you had forgotten you had hidden. Your own personal pirate treasure.
It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day I had first kissed my now husband. We used to argue over which day it was since the kiss technically took place in the middle of the night. I think my husband won. This was the date we celebrated for twenty-five years. It didn’t really matter if it was the right day or not.
I was putting a throwback picture on the wall, the Facebook wall this time, not an actual wall. It was one of the first photos we ever took together. His mother had taken it. We were sitting on his bed in his dorm room. I was still clinging to the 80s with hair probably bigger than it should have been and his newly grown beard was just starting to fill in.
When I popped the picture out of the frame, I found something behind the photograph. It wasn’t money. It was a letter. A letter I had written to my husband 12 weeks after we started dating.
This picture sat in every dorm room/apartment/home we had since 1989. He must have tucked the letter back there twenty-five years ago and forgotten all about it.
I didn’t remember writing it, but I was always writing him dopey love letters. This one was dopey, too. Lovesick, heartfelt, nauseating, complete with references about how gushy mushy the letter was.
It was kind of awful being confronted with your 18-year-old self.
I remembered that time, when no one thought we would last. Not one person thought we would make it when we started. Yet both of us, pretty much always thought we would. Forever.
In the letter, I talked about a lot of things. Some of those things are still accurate today, some are not.
I talked about how nervous I was about being away from him for Christmas. Seemed so silly after all these years to be so insecure about a three-week break, but my eighteen-year-old self was pretty unsure about where this relationship was going.
I wrote how we had absolutely nothing in common. That was true at the time. He was an engineer and I was a film major. But as we built our life together, we grew into our common goals for the future. It turned out we wanted the same things out of life.
My favorite part of the letter is when I wrote, “There is something about you I just can’t put my finger on.” That is still true to this day. I still can’t explain exactly what it is about him that makes me love him so completely.
The letter showed the sprouts of a relationship just beginning to grow. Since then, the roots of our marriage have grown strong and deep.
I take for granted the comfort level of it. The security of knowing that we will be together forever. That we trust each other completely. And still, after 25 years, I know that we will last. Forever.
The dollar bill is still behind the picture of my mother’s grandmother.
I tucked the letter to my then boyfriend back behind the picture of us.
Neither one of us will ever be broke.
Nine characters, five stories, one marriage.
Can one writer save them all?
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Unfinished
By Amy Snyder
Fiery Seas Publishing
Women's Fiction
July 25, 2017
Mirabelle is a writer who just can't finish any of the stories she starts. When her twins leave home for college, they take with them Mirabelle’s sense of identity. As she strives to adjust to her empty nest she is visited by someone unexpected: a character from the very first novel she ever attempted to write.
Characters from all of her unfinished works begin to materialize in her home, in her car, at her job. They talk, yell, and some even throw things at her. Mirabelle can see them, smell them, touch them and though she knows they’re not real, she can’t help but engage them. She created them, after all. They become part of her daily life and she finds herself alternating between hiding them from and sharing them with her almost-always-doting husband, Alex.
Some of Mirabelle’s characters are like good friends, encouraging her to finish something she’s started. Others manipulate her for their own needs and story lines. Good and bad, these characters are part of her and Mirabelle discovers she needs to both fix and finish them before they destroy her life, her sanity, and her marriage.
About the Author:
Amy Snyder began writing when she realized the strange things that happened in her imagination were far more interesting than the things that happened in her real life. After earning her degree in Radio, Television, and Film from Northwestern University, she worked at a financial brokerage house, a nationally published magazine, an advertising agency, and most recently, an elementary school as a Math Tutor, Substitute Teacher, and Library Paraprofessional.
But she’s always been a writer.
Amy lives in Glastonbury, Connecticut with her husband, two teenage children, and two cats. While she has been known to talk out loud to the characters she’s writing, she hasn’t had an actual hallucination…yet.
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