Love Letters

After long nights of editorial work, mornings often find me at the worn oak kitchen table with my daughters, a cup of coffee, a pen, and a pad of paper. This morning we make a get well card for a young cousin. Last week we sat here and made birthday card for Dzia Dzia.

Two weeks earlier we had cut valentines for an afternoon kindergarten class of twenty. Megan cuts pastes, draws, or pats on stickers. She asks me to spell or to take dictation. Two-year-old Christine parrots Megan’s questions and energetically scribbles her own “letter” in washable marker. As I teach Megan to read, I teach her to write short notes. I write my own letters then, to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, and friends.

What do I write? The big events, the minutiae, my hopes and dreams--anything and everything. I’ve never been able to keep a diary for more than two days running. Yet for more than ten years I’ve sent streams of letters, sometimes trickles, sometimes in floods, but there’s never been such a drought that they dried up altogether.

It must be the writer in me who knows that diaries get stale. Writing is meant to be read by someone else, published, even if only for the eyes of one reader. My pen is refilled by the comment, “how much I appreciate your letters.”

When as children we took family vacations to our grandparents’ farm two hundred miles away from our home, I couldn’t help notice the big flat boxes upstairs. They were from our mother and her brothers and sisters--letters home. Their aged paper and five-cent stamps spoke silently of lives lived. Their mystery appealed to my imagination.

Letters played varied roles in my youth. I had penpals in faraway places. Shoji, from Japan, sent me beautiful letters, cleverly illustrated with colored pencil drawings. I tried to equal his, but was never satisfied with the results. As a high school student, I spent a summer abroad. My parents worried about me when a mail strike stalled my letters and postcards home.

My husband Mark and I met as a first-year college students. Our universities were eight hundred miles apart and our budgets small, so we corresponded. When I spent my junior year abroad, we exchanged airmail letters. I saved Mark’s letters, and on our wedding anniversary I dig them out. We read them aloud and refresh our memories. We see how much our lives have changed, how much we’ve grown.

For a while I tried to be a modern correspondent. I composed and stored my letters on computer. I individualized them--or so I thought--and printed them in batches. That way no one got my news second hand. After about six months of computer printed letters, one of my sisters took me to task. She revealed that she had read virtually the same letter I’d sent her while visiting our parents. Suddenly my letters lost their luster. I went back to writing them one by one, in longhand.

When our father died suddenly, we six children rushed hundreds of miles home to be with our mother. The girls and I were the only family members able to stay with Mom for several weeks. One night, Mom pulled down a box from the top shelf of her closet. It was full of letters, letters sent home to her parents, saved, and later returned to her by her mother. Mom shared this treasure with me. We pored over the letters, reading of Mom’s college years, of her meeting and falling in love with our father, of their life together, of children being born--the big events, the minutiae, the hopes and dreams. Here and there, my father’s handwriting jumped off the page at me, speaking with loops and points, as well as in its words.

The next morning, I wrote a letter to my husband, who had had to return to work. Megan drew a picture and labeled it “Daddy.” When we finally arrived home, the letter was on my desk; the drawing was stuck to the refrigerator door with a magnet.

Not all my words are set down on paper. To be honest, I do use the telephone and email, and I enjoy It. In fact, when asked to name my hobbies, I list talking. Getting immediate feedback is exciting and satisfying. Yet spoken words fade much faster than ink, so I teach Megan the almost lost art of letter writing, and sooner than I can imagine, Christine will be old enough to read and write too.

My first letter from Megan came last summer when she went away from home for the first time, on a camping trip with her grandparents. She had dictated the contents to Dzia Dzia, but the signature was unmistakably hers. Reading it made my heart beat faster. But then, it always does when I read love letters.

[This narrative has been published a number of times, first in 1995, but the changes in technology have dated this once evergreen essay. Now, I email or chat most of my correspondance, and I reserve my writing on paper for brainstorming creative work, annotating the margins of books, reflecting in my journal, and writing Christmas cards.]