The Lost Art Of Correspondence

This summer has been filled with visiting family and friends, and travel back and forth to the UK. It has been full of chatter, reconnection and laughter.....how wonderful!

I've had friends from the USA and Canada stop by for a few days on their European vacations, old friends and sisters, son and daughter, all spending time with us, chatting about their lives, the world and its problems, books we have enjoyed and the movies we would recommend. Laughter rang out, advice was given and all our lives, hopefully not just mine, enriched by the experience.

One of the things that came out of these conversations is how Facebook has stopped us from writing letters or emailing a more complete overview of our lives. I am a Facebook fan, it allows me to keep in touch with family and friends, to see their children go off to kindergarten or college, to share the joy in a new birth or revel in the photos of a wonderful vacation. But I have come to realize that those two line comments aren't communication, and that friends who have chosen not to "join the herd" and join Facebook are not so involved in my life nor I in theirs, and have now made a plan to start emailing and mailing letters to friends occasionally.

Correspondence is a lost art. When was the last time you received a letter in the mail that wasn't from your child's Student Loan company or a flyer from National Geographic? How delightful was it when you saw a letter on your doormat, or in your mailbox, addressed to you from a dear friend or loved family member! I cherish a letter my grandmother sent me after she had visited Martin and I way back in the mid-80's and heartily regret not printing out the long chatty emails my dad used to send when we first moved to the USA. What will future generations refer to when there are no love-letters or letters from parents to children, full of sage advice. My mother-in-law still has the letters my father-in-law wrote from his tank in Germany in the 1940's....I think the only note I have from my husband is a shopping list! My future grandchildren will have to surmise the romance from the list of teabags, trash bags, Tanqueray gin and a copy of Top Gear magazine! (Maybe this comment will inspire a love letter of Robert Browning proportions!) Martin has just read a book called Dear Lupin: Letters to a Wayward Son by Roger Mortimer and one of my favorite websites is Letters Of Note http://www.lettersofnote.com/  It has some fabulous, insightful letters from  people from the past and the present that have me nodding my head at the astute advice or laughing at the humor. What a lost art letter writing is and how it explains the times in which it is written, for example the love letter written by Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn or the letters written by John and Abigail Adams, during the US War of Independence.

So, dear friends and family, listen out for the sound of a letter dropping on the mat, or the "thrumm" of the mailman's van and I shall do the same. I'm off right now to the stationers to buy paper and envelopes and a copy of Top Gear magazine! As Goethe once said, "Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them."