When She was a little girl during World War II, her family had a maid. Oh, no, they weren’t rich, just well educated French stock, whose ancestors came down from Canada in the long, long ago. The “maid” was their housekeeper, a simple local girl named Jolene whose boyfriend was away in the Army in Europe.

On hot afternoons in the summer Jolene, we were told, would stand at the edge of the front yard waiting for the mailman to bring a long-awaited letter from her boyfriend, and, for young Kay, a letter from her brothers Cyril Jr. and Bob, who had vanished into the vast sea of uniforms.

Kay would sit on the stoop of her porch and watch Jolene twist and twirl in a lonely dance, singing to herself, “no letter today,” as she watched for the old mailman to come up the street. Sometimes, he would pass by without stopping, wave and nod. Kay remembered that she watched Jolene drop sadly to the grass, still singing, “no letter today.”

Jolene’s song became a theme song for my daughters whenever our Hollywood mailman passed our bungalow’s front porch without leaving one of the hefty checks from my agent, or a weekly postcard from Kay’s Pepere and Memere in Maine. Believe it or not, on the hot summer California mornings, the girls even taught our mailman the song, and on the rare empty box days, they would sing it together as they left for school. I’ll bet they still do.

Today, as summer approaches and I sit at my laptop writing, I watch for our mailman’s red, white and blue truck. It rarely stops more than a couple of times a week now.

When my Kay was the Lady of the House, she was, for the first 32 years, a teacher, and shopper for clothes and gifts for her girls. Mr. Mailman never passed us by. The endless catalogs of gifts for every holidays, the French lesson games, and the three books a week she devoured.

There is “no letter today” coming for her from those glassed-in offices in those tall glass pyramids all over the world. For them, there is no more “She.” She had a stack of credit cards for gifts, rarely for herself, just for the Christmases, birthdays and anniversaries of her family, which produced endless stacks of catalogs. She was a subscriber.

Oh, yes! Some still come. Not all of the computers in those endless stores all over the world and those who touch the keys everyday have gotten the word about her silence yet. You see, subscribers never die. They just get deleted.

Everywhere in the world, the sun comes up and goes down on the great cities and small villages we fly over. Look down some evening on your next holiday flight. See the lights going dark out in the offices. There will be no flowers or cards sent from those glass cathedrals, no tears, no prayers, no masses said for them. They weren’t people, just names on a white screen at the end of the day. They were subscribers.

There will be a war somewhere, and some will die. And somewhere on a quiet street in a giant city, or small town, a girl will be twirling and twisting and singing “no letter today.”

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.