Letters

I have lately been lamenting the fact that no one writes letters any more.
It is a dying art, it would seem.

In this electronic age, when we can flick off an email in an instant, the handwritten letter is beginning to assume dinosaur-like status.

I miss the wonder of recieving a loving letter, written, perhaps over the course of several days, & posted with care to arrive in my letterbox, a treat for the day, and indeed, days to come.

I could pore over the written words, picturing the writer. Return to re read at my leisure.

I have quite a large collection of letters, I have saved over the years. Some are letters written by me, & sent to my mother. She carefully saved them over the years. I know she had saved them for re reading, when she felt lonely & so far from us. They made interesting reading for me, as they often contained news of events I had completely forgotten.

I know she had a massive stock take, not too long before she got ill, & she must have thrown away a lot of the letters, or perhaps burnt them. After her death, I found quite a few still remained, carefully stored in an old chocolate box. Somehow it broke my heart, to think of my mother, alone, carefully storing, & rereading those letters.

I also have letters from my mother, & I am reluctant to dispose of them. She is gone from this life now, & I still, childishly cling to the remnants of her being, in those letters. Her wisdom, her love, shining through her words, & her neat handwriting.

When I first married Gom & we moved back to the Southern Island to live, I so longed for my mother's letters. We were temporarily living with my in-laws. How I hated it, when I found my new MIL was going through my things, reading all my letters, & nosing into my suitcases.

It broke my heart, but I made a point of burning the letters, in front of my MIL, once I had read them. I was so glad when we found our own place to live. It was years, however, before I found out the MIL had still gone through my drawers & read my mail, without my knowledge, every chance she got.

She used to wonder why we never asked her to babysit.

I have kept letters written by Aunts now dead & gone. I have a letter written to my mother, by my grandmother.

My grandmother loved writing letters, & she wrote wonderul letters, full of news & interesting little bits & pieces. She had a pen friend in her male cousin in England & they exchanged wonderful letters for many years.

I feel sorry for the teenagers of today. They flick those txt messages, on their phones, to each other, using a shorthand only they can decipher. I know they can store them on their cell phones, -or as we call them, mobiles. Somehow it is not the same though. They cannot tie them with ribbon. Store them in a box, to be re read at liesure. To be laughed at, cried at, in private.

Emails can be printed out, & kept, if it is hard copies one wants, but somehow they are not the same, as a hand written letter, which has been written in slow condideration. I cannot really imagine folding a bunch of printed out emails, & tying them with ribbon or tucking them into a box...

I must admit though, the typewritten word is much more legible than my atrocious hand writing is now! I have not retained my neat writing from years ago, & often, can not even read my own writing! Partly it is due to my arthritic fingers, & partly it is laziness, I suppose.

I know it is the electronic age, & technology is here to be utilised, but I still mourn the 'Love Letters' from the past.

PS. I had no idea I had been nominated as a Blog of Note, so you can imagine my surprise on finding out! Thankyou to all the new visitors, it is fun meeting all of you.




Diana Krall, Love Letters. I also really enjoy Nat King Cole's version of this song.