One day, not too long ago, I came upon some ancient letters from my junior high school years that I had managed to save all this time. There was nothing particularly earth shattering about their contents, but I had tucked them away because I am a sentimental fool and these had been written by my girlfriends, so the notes had special meaning. Rereading them brought a smile to my face—just silly adolescent ramblings from my friends in response to my own silly ramblings written to them.
As I read through them I remembered how much I loved crafting letters to my friends as a young teen, adding little flourishes like doodles, stickers, and funky lettering, sometimes even using sealing wax as a finishing touch. Writing letters on stationary of neon orange sprinkled with daisies or peace signs to the people I cared about somehow made our friendships feel more tangible. And receiving letters from friends was an exhilarating event, as I excitedly peeled open the envelopes and devoured the contents, word by word. Holding a letter or a card in your hands made the thoughts and musings expressed inside somehow feel more real, and forged a kind of invisible bond with the writer.
Now we live in a digital age where emails, Messenger, and text messages make up the bulk of our correspondences. I ask you, how often do you print out and save a sweet email or a thank you text message sent by friends, lovers, or family? I would wager maybe a sliver of the population would bother to do that. So all those meaningful sentiments are not captured and treasured in a physical form as a valuable memory. Instead they eventually get lost in the morass of your email inbox or, poof!, deleted altogether.
This makes me pine for the days when it was the social norm for people to sit down and pen a little note expressing gratitude or emotions or just a ‘thinking about you” life update. Now we default to Facebook or Instagram to keep up with each other, and that’s fine. But the one-on-one note or letter in the mail is becoming a thing of the past, sadly. Maybe we should revive it and make the effort to single out a special friend, surprising them when they pick up their mail one day.
I still save special notes and cards that I receive from the cherished people in my life. I just can’t bear to toss them out, so I have a plastic bin in my closet where I accumulate them. One friend I made on a trip to Italy surprised me one day with a random card in the mail and funny photos of our escapades she’d made prints of. Yep, actual photos on paper, imagine that!
About eight years ago, I reconnected with a gal who I had known at age 15 when my siblings and I were guests at her parent’s dude ranch in Idaho. I had driven through St. Anthony, Idaho on a road trip in 2006 and wondered what she was up to all these decades later. I wrote a letter to a relative of hers I somehow found on the Internet, which eventually resulted in a letter from her.
Of course, we eventually connected on Facebook, which pretty much ended our handwritten correspondence. However, one day I received a package in the mail. Inside was a bundle of letters that I had written to her after we had become friends at the dude ranch in our teens. She had kept them all these years, and thought I’d get a kick out of reading what amounts to a time capsule.
In the letters I expressed typical teenage angst, as well as my total obsession with fashion, described concerts I attended, and, of course, my boyfriend sagas. Reading the letters now was entertaining as heck. But the fact that she had kept them all these years meant that I had touched her life, too.
Call me old fashioned, but I miss the days when we made the effort to communicate with the scrawl of a pen, pencil, or marker. I still send Christmas cards with an actual written message and my signed name, for goodness sake! A relic among the single-sided photo cards with a digitally generated greeting and signature. Sure those are great to receive and an expeditious way of getting cards out during the holidays, but I feel compelled to actually write “Merry Christmas” on the cards I send out.
Most of us who are mothers have kept the darling handmade cards our kids once made us. To me, these are absolute treasures that meant more to me than any store bought gift ever could. Seeing the cute pictures they drew, carefully colored in with crayons or markers, always brought a smile to my face. But it was the words they wrote, sentiments written in their own hand, that registered so deeply in my heart.
And speaking of the kids, when I packed up the family home and downsized three years ago I made sure to safely store all of the letters and cards that their friends, cousins, etc. had written them, certain that one day they will be grateful they weren’t thrown out. After all, they had hung onto them for a reason, and I get that.