How I Met My Husband

"There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, my hair starting to go gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that." pg 146
How I Met My Husband
Alice Munro


For this story, I am going to answer question 6:
 "Can you detect the voice of an older, wiser Edie who is distinct from the young girl working for Dr. and Mrs. Peebles?"
This story is mainly a reminiscent one because the narrator Edie says things such as, "I didn't know how to joke back then," and, "I was slimmer at fifteen that anybody would believe who knows me now."  Quotes like these show that Edie is wiser and older, looking back on a past event, possibly telling children or grandchildren the story of how she met her husband.
At the beginning of the story, Edie is portrayed as innocent because she fell for an older man, Chris, and she didn't understand what intimacy was. She was a girl that was in love with/infatuated with Chris who accepted her even though she was a "hired girl," and who also called her beautiful, so "out of the common for a man to say something like that to a woman."  Though the two only met a few times, Edie had hope that he would send her letters and that they would maybe end up together one day.  Toward the end, though, reality struck Edie. She began to mature when she decided that she wouldn't waste her life waiting around for a man she hardly knew. The message of this story is that if you sit around waiting for the perfect moment, it just might pass you by. Basically, don't waste away time waiting for something to happen, do something about it.  When she realized that she couldn't spend her time waiting around for something that would never come, she let go the part of her that was a naive young girl.