by Shari Randall
Does anyone write letters anymore?
One of my daily treats is the walk from
Musty Manor to the post office. We don’t have mail delivery in my neighborhood.
Everyone goes to the casino to check their mailbox and visit with Heather, the
postmistress of the miniature post office. Yes, I did say casino. The building
is called the casino but there are no slot machines or games of chance, other
than what might show up in your mailbox.
Even in the short time we’ve lived
here, I’ve noticed that my mail has dwindled, and dwindled into four types:
junk, my Talbot’s catalogs (they were the only business wily enough to find me
at my new address), Official Stuff (bills, tax, voting), and the rare Good Stuff
(packages and personal missives). In December the good stuff still included
holiday cards from the diehards, but the rest of the year, the Good Stuff is
letters or cards.
I still adore receiving a birthday card
(hint, hint) but birthday cards and party invitations have mostly made the leap
to digital and they’re not going back. Many of my nieces and nephews are of
marrying age, and there is still nothing like the hefty wedding invitation.
This is the only thing that the young folks consider mail worthy.
Being of A Certain Age, I remember
letters. Phone calls used to be too expensive and stamps used to be cheap, so
faraway friends would write page after page of news and gossip. What a treat to
find a letter from a friend in the mailbox.
Even better were love letters. I’ll bet
that many of you have letters tucked away, letters tied with a ribbon. Letters
too precious to open again, too precious to discard. Now I like my tech, thank
you very much, but I wonder how a tweet or a text message stacks up against a
real love letter. Feelings put into words, and words onto paper, made emotions
tangible and permanent. Proof. Words you could save and savor, decades later.
Donne wrote, “letters mingle souls.” Do
texts mingle souls?
When I visited Wellesley College for my
daughter’s graduation, we went to the campus library. The library displays the actual mahogany
door to Elizabeth Barrett’s family home at 50 Wimpole Street in London. Through the mail slot passed 573 letters from the man who
would be her husband, poet Robert Browning. Those letters are now available to
the public through a partnership between Wellesley and Baylor University. Will
I read them? I don’t think so. Even dead poets deserve some privacy.
Do you write actual pen to paper
letters anymore?
