Nineteen Days of Letters

At the end of January, I took on this challenge: to send out something in the mail every delivery day in February. It could be a card, a letter, a postcard, or something not written at all, like a DVD or a fabric swatch. I printed a calendar to help me map out the recipients and what I would send them. Nineteen mailing days later, I confess that this project has been harder than I expected.

Some of it was easy. Two of my brothers were born in February, so I picked out some appropriately rude cards, per our tradition, and crossed them off my calendar. I had to send a draft of my book in the mail — that took care of another day. My daughter needed a DVD from home, someone had to be thanked for a cookbook she sent, and a friend’s husband underwent major surgery which necessitated a get-well card, although I’m sure he didn’t have the procedure just so he could get mail from me.

I sent some heart-felt letters to a few people, sentiments that were long overdue. And then, after a few postcards scattered in there to cover the days when I was short on time, I started to run out of steam. This morning, I wrote a note to my husband and mailed it to him from the exact same mailbox where it will be delivered tomorrow. This is probably cheating.

I wrote a lot of letters when I was a kid. I met my first friend in Tucson while visiting here from Granville, and we were penpals for a year until my parents and I moved to a house on her street. Back then, letter-writing was a unit children learned in second grade because it was such an important skill. The teacher taught us the difference between a formal letter, which was dry and business-y, and an informal one. Informal letters, at least as my friends and I wrote them, all began the same way.

Dear _________,

How are you? I am fine.

Then you would fill in with some newsy bits about which class you liked best in school and an anecdote about the family dog, ending with

Write back soon!

Love,

Michelle

When we moved away from Granville, I exchanged letters with my grandmother for nearly 20 years. I wrote letters to my friends in Tucson when I went away to college and to my college friends while home on summer break. And they wrote back because we were living in a prehistoric time when the internet did not exist, and we had no other way to stay in touch.

And that, Dear Reader, seems to be the problem with this experiment. No one has written back to me. After I’ve come up with something to say and gotten it down on paper — complete with scratch-outs because this medium doesn’t have a “delete” button to create the illusion of perfection — I’ve received no reinforcement for ever doing it again. It’s just dead air out there. I don’t know if something I wrote made someone happy or confused or if it even arrived. My notes seem not to have sparked any ongoing correspondence. No response will greet me in the mailbox a few weeks from now. It’s very unsatisfying.

This makes me sad. Letters are a record of our history, our emotions, and a window into our relationships with each other. Unfortunately, letter-writing is dying. In another generation or two, it will be completely lost. Thoughtful correspondence is being replaced by…how else to say it…bullshit. People communicate more frequently than they ever have, but they don’t say much that needs to be savored or saved. Quantity has overtaken quality in what we share with each other. As a writer, this bums me out. As a literate human, it might bother you a little, too.

However, with just a few more mailing days left in February, I will persist. Another birthday greeting, maybe a note to my late friend Nancy‘s husband. I’m sending a card, with a picture of chimpanzees on the front, to our 5-year old granddaughter. She probably won’t write back to me because no one will teach her how. Pen and paper is so 20th century. So are the letters my grandmother wrote to me 35 years ago. Still, I’m awfully glad I have them.