Back in the days before cell phones, when I was not yet an adult so junk mail and bills didn’t exist for me, I loved mail. I’d eagerly await the mail truck every day, especially in summer, in hopes I’d get a letter from a friend or my pen pal in Maine. When there was a hand-addressed envelope in the mailbox, my heart would leap with delight.
In high school, when my dear friend went away to camp every summer, and then moved away against her will junior year, we wrote each other multiple letters per week. Fat letters that pushed the limits of envelopes drenched in doodles and drawings.
My husband and I lived apart the first two years of our courtship. And by apart, I don’t mean we live in separate apartments, I mean that he was finishing his summer job in the Florida Keys, or hiking the Appalachian Trail, or working on Jekyll Island while I finished college in Athens, Georgia. We got to know each other through letters.
For the same reasons I appreciate communicating through written text at work — writing refines thought and anchors ideas that can be revisited and reread for contemplation — I am grateful for written correspondences with people I know and love. You get to know different parts of each other through writing that might not come through in spoken conversations. You get to see inside someone’s mind when they have the privacy and quiet to sit down and write a letter, alone, without a partner conversing in real time with them. You have an artifact you can keep for 35 years, then open one day if you’re feeling nostalgic, and see their handwriting, and what was important to you both at that point in your lives, and smile with love for this person who makes your life better because they make you laugh, they open your eyes, they make you think about things in fresh ways, they’ve helped you become who you are.
I am still close with my dear friend who I wrote letters with 35 years ago. She visited me while I was on sabbatical, and she told me she wants to get back into letter writing. She and I have been writing letters back and forth ever since. I checked the mailbox last night and found a hand-addressed envelope in there for me. My heart leapt with delight.
We had family dinner and game night plans, so I saved the letter. When I went to bed, I knew I’d have it to look forward to in the quiet of morning, and I again felt that little thrill of delight. I savored it just now with my coffee, and some time in my downtime of the weekend, I get to compose a response.
Butterfly Mind 
3 responses to “Letters”
I got a pen pal in Ohio when I was 13 and I lived in Scotland. We wrote to each other for years. Unfortunately, we lost touch. Years later, I found the original letter she sent me and it made me want to get in touch. I wrote to her parents’ house and was lucky that they still lived there. I got back in touch with my friend and we caught up with both our lives, married, children, etc. We kept in touch through Facebook from then, but I still miss the letters. In 2022, I was lucky enough that she travelled over and we met up and had a great time together. We regularly speak through Facebook Messenger and sometimes have video calls. I will always love letters and cards.
Letters are special! I rarely write letters these days, but I always make an effort to send thoughtfully chosen cards to friends and family for birthdays and special occasions.
I wrote lots of letters when I was a kid too, especially when I was doing drum and bugle corps. We would get together one weekend a month for practice. We all lived within an hour drive of each other or so, but that was far enough away that it was a long distance phone call, which was expensive, so we would write each other letters. I still have most of them in a box in my attic. Maybe I will browse through them some time while I am on my sabbatical.
I actually just wrote my son a letter just a little bit before reading this blog post.