In Person

I have one person with whom I still write letters. One.

If you're a saver like me, you probably have boxes of letters from the past. Or, if you're like me, a whittled-down, rubber-banded pack in your desk drawer. They seemed important to keep.

When last have you gotten a letter through the mail? When one arrives through our slot, I am absolutely thrilled. Someone has taken the time to find a blank sheet of paper, a pen that works, a stamp from the depths of a drawer somewhere, an address book, and the time to sit at the kitchen table, a desk, an easy chair, and write their thoughts of you, to you.

Exquisite. 

While I'm not decrying email, texting, whatever, I'm ready to marvel at the amazing procedure I described above because of how much time and effort it requires.

When we taught school in Newfoundland, I, of course wrote home volumes to my parents, trying to bridge the enormous gap between Carmanville and Hinkletown. The miracle wasn't that I wrote; it was that Mother kept those letters and returned them to me years later. They are now in a notebook, all different size paper, red-blue-black inks, smudges - but they are gloriously real. The experiences that I may question in my heart,  there they are on paper - the highs, the lows, the delights, the sorrows - all there.

Yes, we can record all of those things electronically today. But isn't there an enormous differences in the life that breaths through those hand-written documents? When my friend writes in her awkward lefty script, I see braids, freckles, laughter, skinned knees - the person. When I read a typed page I get the message, not the essence.

I mourn.