I don’t go to the mailbox every day anymore. There was a time when I knew to the minute when the mailman would come. My desk in the Eyrie with its view of sky and trees and the front gate does afford me the vision of the little black mailcar driving around our street but it’s a rare occasion to see it stop with anything for us. We are more likely to get delivery vans feeding the online shopping addiction shared by many members in the family! In fact, of the four houses I can see from my perch there tends to be something for only one of us on any given day. The mailman doesn’t get out of his car, just reaches out the window to the street side box and is gone within moments.
There was a time when there was always something to deposit into my mailbox. Sometimes (ok, mostly) bills. Sometimes junk mail. Sometimes a stamped envelope with my name and address on it in the familiar handwriting of a friend. In that time I carried little books of stamps with me and knew where the nearest post box was to mail my own regular post to friends and family.
When my dear friends moved overseas to do their post docs in Germany we started an almost daily email correspondence that sustained us for three years. On their return I printed out all of our letters to one another and gave them to her as a gift, memories of her experience and of our friendship. I still needed to see those letters in paper form.
It’s yet another sign of the times changing so rapidly and of my own stubborn resistance to it!
Sitting beside me is a packet of letters from the time I spent on exchange in Germany. They’re still in chronological order of receipt… The majority are aerogrammes and some are flimsy envelopes holding letters written on the almost see through airmail paper to keep it as light as possible and therefore the postage to a minimum. Sending thoughts and love overseas was an expensive business and yet my mother wrote to me every day that I was away. Those aerogrammes are precious to me now, those time capsules of daily life and love that are wishes in my mind but are reality in the physicality of the pen on paper I can hold in my hand.
I am under no illusions (I hope) that the efficiency and speed of the texts and emails we can send today have built us another, more immediate, form of contact with one another and I wouldn’t be without them. Truly!
And yet…
I cannot let go of the beloved, fading art of writing letters by hand. I write on beautiful paper always and with one of my fountain pens that bring me such joy. There is plenty of research around now that proves the physical act of putting pen to paper accesses the brain and connects the writer to their words in a far more active, focused and direct state of flow than communicating via the intermediary of a keyboard ever does. I write faster on my computer, no question, and am frequently surprised by what comes of that, my fingers seeming to move faster than my thoughts so I am forever trying to read and catch up with what I apparently think! A letter doesn’t ask for that. A good letter is about connection. It captures emotions and hopes and relationship and the messiness of life. I love it when there are words curling up the side of a page when paper has run out, the ‘xoxo’ tucked into the bottom corner not as an afterthought but as a crucial bookend to the message that must not be edited out.
During the pandemic I received, in one of those unexpected physical deliveries to our mailbox, a packet of postcards with the suggestion to send them all. Challenge accepted! I bought stamps (which seem to have increased in price by a lot since I last walked into a post office!) and pulled out my old address book*. Each week I wrote down a few thoughts on a card and sent it to someone I cared about. Some live in the same town as me, others further afield. For me it was the act of writing and sending that was a thrill. I had no idea if or when the recipient opened their mailbox and found my card. I had no expectations of any response either. Some went off into the ether, their fate unknown. I had texts from surprised by pleased loved ones. Two put pen to paper and sent me back a note of their own and restarted that beloved snail mail communication we both love.
We still write. Our letters can take weeks to travel between Australian states and one apparently took a jaunt via Singapore for reasons unknown to either of us so our conversations are in a timeline apart from the daily lives we lead. It brings me joy to drop a letter into the postbox and wish it well on its travels. I imagine my friend finding it and opening it, making a cup of tea to sit and read in comfort. Well, that’s what I do when I get one back. A real letter should be treated respectfully and read slowly, reread before responding, kept in a box by the desk.
I had penpals when I was in High School, one in England and one in Germany. We wrote to one another regularly for four years and then, with the end of school, it stopped. I wonder what happened to them, those friends I knew so much about but wouldn’t have recognised if we passed one another in the street. Perhaps I should search for them on Facebook?
*(For those reading who are a little younger than me a quick explanation about address books. We used to write down where people lived and their phone numbers and keep them in a book so we could find them. I know. Effort.)