I cannot decipher a single word of it. It’s not that she has bad handwriting. Actually, she does. I want to say that it’s just that she writes in cursive, and I’m bad at reading cursive, but… I can usually at least figure it out. 

From context clues, I’ve figured out that it is a thank you note, thanking me for sending her a thank you note for the book she got me for Christmas. I’m considering sending her a thank you note for sending me a thank you note for sending her a thank you note for getting me a gift. I want to see how long I could get it to go back and forth. Then I decided against it, because I don’t have any stamps. That, and it was a terrible idea. 

It also seems that she started writing on the right side of the card, and, rather than continuing on the back, she resumed her chicken scratch handwriting (which, looking back, is what she has always called my handwriting… the hypocrite!) on the left side of the card, with no arrows or markings of any kind to inform me of which side to read first.  Of course, she couldn’t have written over or crossed out the quote on the back of the card:

One nation, under God…

Oh how wonderful His gifts. 

(I changed no punctuation or capitalization.)

Now let us see how many of these words I can actually read:

• “thanks”
• Either “loosely” or “lovely”
• “RT”
• “yous herp”
• “STtrTud”
• “endless!”
• “2ve”
• “s??lh”
• “SNow & IeE” 
• “lousy” or “lovesly”
• “benign” or “bright”
• “SNAUSHoeing” (snowshoeing?)
• “welts”
• “reading”
• “Tiger” or “Ticker”
• “ascam”
• “fo”
• “arr”
• and the last words before her signature: “The ears”