I am having a difficult time coming up with a conclusion about "How I Met My Husband."In my thesis I wrote that author introduces Edie as an...

In Alice Munro's "How I Met My Husband," it may be
important to note that the title is purposely misleading. I remember the first time I
read this story, and I was sure Edie was going to marry the pilot, but nothing could be
further from the truth. Edie is young and falls in love with the pilot who is not only
too old for her, but engaged to another woman. We can also question the kind of man
Chris Watters is, first for kissing the young Edie: it seems only the "grace of God"
that he does not "ravish" the young girl on the spot. Fortunately for her, he
stops—splashing water on himself and her to cool them both down. Second, he also
misleads Edie into believing that he does not care for his fiancée, Alice, and will
write to Edie so she knows where he is. The letter never
comes.

The fact that he is a pilot might be symbolic that
Edie is trying to reach out for something far beyond who she is, like Icarus flying too
close to the sun with wings of wax. Watters is out of her league and dangerous, not only
for her reputation but for her hopes for happiness. Realistically, Edie is a "hired
girl...who has little education, money, or status." She is also very young and
naive.

It is, of course, this naivete that allows Edie to
be in the right place at the right time. Day after day, she sits waiting for the letter
that will never arrive from Chris Watters. The mailman comes each day to find Edie in
the same spot.

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"You've got the smile I've been waiting on all
day!" he used to holler out the car
window.

The process of
constantly waiting eventually strikes Edie with a sense of the futility in what she has
been doing: she knows now that the letter will not
arrive:

Till
it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. I imagined
me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go
gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that. So I stopped meeting the
mail.

When she does so, the
mailman, who she has become friendly with, calls her and tells her that he missed seeing
her. They date, become engaged and marry. He jokes with their children that Edie "went
after him by sitting by the mailbox every day." She does not correct him: thinking that
she did so makes him happy.

If I were constructing a
conclusion to an essay about this short story, I would probably
write:

Edie waits each day for word from the pilot, but
soon realizes something about herself: she cannot be a woman who spends her time
waiting, but has to be someone who is busy and not holding her
breath until life finds her. The truth of Edie's self-awareness
comes to her when the mailman asks for a date—she does not wait,
but jumps in and accepts the date, the engagement, and the love that grows between them.
How she met her husband had nothing to do with
flying.