The Lost Art of Letter Writing

I still keep the letters my grandmother sent me — dozens of them, in a shallow wooden box. They are dated in the same careful hand, and the paper has begun to soften in the corners.

What I notice, reading them now, is how little she was in a hurry. She wrote about the garden, about the weather, about a dog that visited the porch. None of it was urgent. All of it was intentional.

A different kind of time

A letter is written in one time and read in another. That gap — sometimes a day, sometimes a week — is where the medium does its work. You cannot dash off a letter the way you can dash off a text. The paper resists it.

I have started writing one letter a week again. Not to accomplish anything. Just to remember how it feels to say something slowly.