About letter writing

While Atticus and the girls were out of town, I took the opportunity to clean out a couple of files and storage boxes, which led me to sort through some old correspondence.

Correspondence.

I mean letters. Do you remember them?

They arrived in envelopes. The ones I sorted were old, yellowing things with stamps varying in value from fifteen to twenty-five cents.

Letters that people had sent me -- pieces of paper over which someone (a lot of someones, actually, someones I loved and still love) had labored to articulate feelings, ideas, hopes, random thoughts, jokes, or sometimes, simply, the idea that they were thinking of me. Or that they were glad I had been thinking of them.

What are we losing in this iWorld we live in?

Will my children have files, boxes, piles of correspondence which they'll one day need to sift through and measure, reminisce over, weigh the importance of, keep or discard?

Such a sweet gift - a piece of handmade writing, in an envelope that is not a bill, sitting in our friend's path when she trudges home from a long day spent among wahoos and savages, a day our words will help repair. They don't need to be immortal, just sincere. She can read them twice and again tomorrow: You're someone I care about, Corrine, and think of often and every time I do you make me smile.  

~~ Garrison Keillor, How to Write a Personal Letter

I tossed a lot of stuff out. Meaningless notes, lists of classes I was taking, gossip about a teacher, accountings of relationships past, things that embarrass the person I've become, or notes from people I don't even remember very well. But I kept as much as I discarded. Expressions of love from a young Atticus. Heartfelt notes from my sister, written during difficult times in her life, and in mine. Letters from my friend, Jack, with whom I was trying to decipher the world. Notes from my old friend, Jeff, who doesn't write anymore, but whom I still love and always will. 

We need to write, otherwise nobody will know who we are. They will have only a vague impression of us as A Nice Person, because, frankly, we don't shine at conversation, we lack the confidence to thrust our faces forward and say, "Hi! I'm Heather Hooten; let me tell you about my week." Mostly we say "Uh-huh" and "Oh, really." People smile and look over our shoulder, looking for someone else to meet. 

~~ Garrison Keillor, How to Write a Personal Letter

In many ways, Facebook has taken over what letters used to be. And how many of us aren't grateful? Hasn't the Christmas card list been whittled down to nearly nothing, or at least to something manageable because, honestly, everyone already knows what we're doing, thanks to Facebook? And thanks to our blogs. And thanks to email, which is quick and easy. And always -- still -- feels like just a bit of a cheat.

We want to be known. We want her to know that we have fallen in love, that we quit our job, that we're moving to New York, and we want to say a few things that might not get said in casual conversation: Thank you for what you've meant to me, I'm very happy right now. 

~~ Garrison Keillor, How to Write a Personal Letter

I miss the ripping open of an envelope, the anticipation of what the words on this page will convey, the intimacy of a pen, parchment, and innermost thoughts.

Perhaps I am too old for innermost thoughts. Perhaps letters -- the kind I'm romanticizing -- are the stuff of youth, and perhaps there is no place in my life for them now.

But I don't think so.

A letter doesn't have to be filled with existential angst to be a pearl without price. Innermost thoughts needn't be forbidden, or difficult or searching. They can simply be. They can be what I am now. The person I've become. The person you've become. Those needn't be the same thing. "This is what I'm thinking about these days," the letter might say. "This is what I wonder about your thoughts. And how is homeschooling going, by the way? What's that like?"

Probably your friend will put your letter away, and it'll be read again a few years from now - and it will improve with age. And forty years from now, your friend's grandkids will dig it out of the attic and read it, a sweet and precious relic of the ancient eighties that gives them a sudden clear glimpse of you and her and the world we old-timers knew.

~~ Garrison Keillor, How to Write a Personal Letter

I am a nostalgic person. I am a saver of things, a hoarder of mementos, a connoisseur of remembrances of things past. I am a sigher over love letters, a disbeliever in the depth of the love of a man like Atticus, a keeper of the many thoughts and people who shaped me.

I am a lover of the letter. And I miss it.

I shall begin to write letters again, I think. And I can only hope that the sweet gifts, these  pieces of handmade writing, will flutter back to me in the end and become something  -- a  box, a pile, a treasured stack wrapped in ribbon -- that I will give to my children and say, "Here ... this is me. This is who I was, and who I wanted to be. Read. And savor. And write."