Do you remember the last time you received a handwritten letter? If you’re under fifty, you may have never received one at all, except for some hastily written sentences scrawled at the bottom of a greeting card.
Before e mail and smart phones and texting, it was costly to make long distance phone calls, and people actually sat down and wrote letters. Especially if you were in the dating mode. I had boyfriends in the service , boyfriends who went to colleges a long way from home and boyfriends who’d moved away , and it was exciting to wait for the mailman and see your name scrawled across an envelope with their return address. Heart pounding, you would tear open the envelope and pore over every single word. If it was a love letter, you would hide it in a drawer so your mother wouldn’t see it, and read it over and over again until you got another one.
My college girlfriends also wrote letters in the summer, full of news about vacations, who they were dating, and all those gossipy things young women talk about. Their handwriting and enclosed snapshots were unique and personal, almost as if they were right there in the room.
After I was married and lived far from home, my mother and I exchanged letters every week, pounded out on an old typewriter. We never bothered with spelling and punctuation corrections (too much trouble to stop and erase), but we both looked forward to hearing about what was going on in each other’s lives. I could go back to the letter all week, anytime I was feeling lonely and missed my family. A personal letter was a comfort and also a great compliment . It meant someone cared enough about you to sit down for maybe an hour, address an envelope, buy a stamp, and take it to the post office.
You know what I’ve going to do today? I’m going to sit right down and write someone a letter.
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