I don't want to say it too loudly and jinx anything, but, wow! It was warm enough for me to hang a load of laundry outside. I put the deck chairs out and basked in the warmth as I wrote a letter.
Did you have a pen pal as a kid? I was thinking about mine today. Sarah Jane and I wrote letters from first grade until we reached our early twenties. I should look for her online. How fun would it be to check in with a former pen pal?
My grandmother in Ohio and I also exchanged letters. Hers were so great, full of Little House on the Prairie-like stories. The one that moves me the most, though, was written in response to my asking about her wedding day. I was just about to marry my first husband and had written her about my dress and other details. In her return letter she said I was the first one of her descendants to ever ask about her wedding. She was 16 when she married my grandfather, who was 18. He'd had his eye on her since she was about 12 or so. They went camping for their honeymoon and had a fish fry on their wedding night. That letter is a treasure.
I try to engage my far-flung relatives in letter writing now and again, and although many of the kids like to receive mail, none has a penchant for letter writing. It's a little sad, but maybe that will change.
How do you feel about writing letters? To whom do you write?
Mmmm – a fish fry for their wedding night? That’s my kind of wedding 🙂
It’s been quite nice and spring like around here as well, but I’m trying to keep quiet about it. I don’t want to wake up to snow or ice tomorrow! I did manage to put away all of my winter sweaters this morning but kept a few warmish clothes out… just in case.
When I was in 6th Grade there was a pen pal exchange at school. I was assigned a girl of the same age named Hazel, who lives in England. We’ve been writing ever since, and we’re both 33 now. We could email and save time, but we both prefer the romance of handwritten letters sent by post. We’ll meet someday, I’m sure of it.
I love letter-writing. I don’t do much of it these days, but every so often, I will send a card or a letter to a friend. It’s like a little treat in their mailbox!
Oh, I love writing letters, almost as much as I love receiving them. Unfortunately, I’ve met very few people who felt the same way about writing. And that makes me feel funny and awkward about one-way conversations that never go anywhere. I even have an old friend who doesn’t like to give me more than a sentence or two in an e-mail, always complaining that I write too much and expect too much information in return. I finally just stopped making the effort about a year ago, and the lack of communication from her end tells me that I really wasn’t very important to her. Except when she was really in trouble.
Sigh.
I did have pen pals when I was a kid – bunches of them. What fun!
I had two pen ‘friends’ as my mom called them–one in France and another in Finland. I was *so* into writing them and got so much out of our correspondence–I attribute my love of languages to that experience.
It is a vanishing art, isn’t it? It’s always nice to get a letter but I don’t send too many anymore either because of the instant gratification of email. In fact, I have a ton of notecards people have given me and so seldom use them.
But blogging seems a lot like high-tech letter writing to me, too. You’re just writing for a bigger audience.
My cousin and I used to write letters to each other all the time when we were little and it was so exciting to receive hers. But now we email and it’s still fun to get her emails.