Letters Continued

When I was younger (as in high school and college), I used to write letters to a lot of my friends and boyfriends. I don't know why I did this, but I did. I wrote many letters to many people. I wrote letters to my uncles and they wrote back. My grandmother and I exchanged letters all the time for years and years until her death and I really wished I had saved them. I wrote letters to pen pals and I wrote letters to friends I would meet casually. I wrote pages and pages to boyfriends, who I hope never saved any of them to use against me today ☺.

The funny thing about writing letters is you either do it or you do not.

In this age of internet correspondence such as email and texting, which has taken over this delicate correspondence I believe, deciding to write a letter is neither better nor worse than email. But I believe there is one quality a real letter has that email does not and that is the sensory appeal.

Hand written letters are beautiful because you actually get a piece of the person . . . their writing, their scent, you can hear their words . . . in the crinkling of the paper, you can carry the letter around with you or you could sleep with it if you wanted to.

Sometimes we write to someone simply because we can't speak to that person for one reason or another. A few years ago my little brother and I had a falling out. He had made some decisions with his path in life that I didn't agree with at all. We had words and then we stopped speaking to each other. Completely stopped speaking for two years. I was not going to speak with him this much I knew. I deserved an apology and I was waiting for one. My little brother knows me well . . . well enough to know that he needed to mend this broken relationship to move forward . . . and in order to do that . . . he needed to speak with me. But I was not speaking to him.

So he wrote me a letter.
And another.
And one more after that.
And he kept writing to me until I finally wrote back.
We, my brother and I, corresponded for one full year, writing letters to each other.
Repairing the hurt feelings and egos.
This is the fruits of his labor.
I cherish these letters as much as I cherish my brother.

I consider a hand written letter a bit more special than an email any day.