1.
It took just one letter to hook me on a lifelong appreciation of correspondence.
At six years old, I wrote my first letter. My grandparents had given a gift and my mother insisted I write a thank you note. Her method was simple: I told her what I wanted to write, she wrote the words, then I copied her words to compose my own letter.
With each letter received, I eagerly wrote back. Back and forth. Soon, I was writing on my own. For over 30 years, my grandma and I exchanged letters.
Do other mothers do this? It seems a brilliant way to bring personal expression to life, while also instilling a love of writing. Decades letter, writing and receiving letters is among my favorite things (thanks Mom).
2.
Letter
Today I did almost nothing.
Read a little, tried to write a sentence
to make another sentence seem necessary.
I wasn't unhappy. Everything
I could will myself to do I'd done,
so I said I'd done enough.
Now I'm looking out my window:
white pine, ash, a single birch,
the leanings and crossings
of branches. And then the sky:
pale, undecided. Years ago
you wrote to me about a matter
that worried you, and you said
at the end, "That's probably the best,
and most true, way to think about it."
I kept your sentence in my notebook.
I liked its shape. I admired the way,
young as you were, you could feel
one kind of thinking
adjusting into another, one truth
becoming a better truth.
Now you're far off, and alone, and I
have no advice you haven't already
given yourself. What can I tell you?
That I'm here? That today, when I saw
how tenderly the light was moving
among those trees, I thought of you?
—Lawrence Raab
3.
Does anyone write letters anymore?
I get a few, on occasion. I savor the delivery. How a letter arrives unexpectedly, with a messy scrawl or loopy letters. How a hand on paper can make a mark on the heart, even before the envelope is broken. How the greeting sets a tone, ushers me in or holds me back.
“To say what letters contain is impossible,” writes Anne Carson in The Beauty of the Husband. “In a letter both reader and writer discover an ideal image of themselves, short blinding passages are all it takes.”
I have written letters laying bare all I am or am not, all I wish to be. And I have felt an exhilarated exhaustion.
4.
In a letter we are hungry for connection, for compassion. Are you, too, restless, reaching for a clarity, seeking to both know another and understand yourself? And really, is it not the same quest?
5.
“We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for,” said David Foster Wallace in This Is Water, a commencement speech. “How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?”
Yes, yes, more than just a form of communication, a letter is bridge.
A letter is a call across miles, a plea for presence.
6.
Elegy for the Personal Letter
I miss the rumpled corners of correspondence,
the ink blots and crossouts that show
someone lives on the other end, a person
whose hands make errors, leave traces.
I miss fine stationary, its raised elegant
lettering prominent on creamy shades of ivory
or pearl grey. I even miss hasty notes
dashed off on notebook paper, edges
ragged as their scribbled messages—
can't much write now—thinking of you.
When letters come now, they are formatted
by some distant computer, addressed
to Occupant or To the family living at—
meager greetings at best,
salutations made by committee.
Among the glossy catalogs
and one time only offers
the bills and invoices,
letters arrive so rarely now that I drop
all other mail to the floor when
an envelope arrives and the handwriting
is actual handwriting, the return address
somewhere I can locate on any map.
So seldom is it that letters come
That I stop everything else
to identify the scrawl that has come this far—
the twist and the whirl of the letters,
the loops of the numerals. I open
those envelopes first, forgetting
the claim of any other mail,
hoping for news I could not read
in any other way but this.
7.
Today a six-year old writes me a letter, full of loops and curves, butterflies and hearts. Did her mother help her form the words, sound out each spelling? Did she labor and love? In the receiving, I am both excited child and calm adult, both writer and reader. I am hopeful and heartened.
A few words on paper, that’s all it takes.
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The world turns on words, please read & write.