Today I found myself writing a letter to someone I’ve never met, to someone I don’t know.
The guys at FPN (The Fountain Pen Network) decided it’ll be a good idea to put our pens to work and write… postcards.
Not enough with the postcards keeping the postal service busy, it now progressed to letters.
When all this started, it got me to thinking.
When was the last time I wrote a letter?
By hand?
A personal letter, that is.
I struck a blank.
Then I realized the last real, proper letter I’ve written and sent… was to my other half.
Twenty years ago!
That’s just bloody scary.
Now, those letters… I dug them out over the weekend and read them.
They are love letters. Mine, and his, bundled together, with a ribbon around them.
Yup, we actually wrote proper love letters to each other.
He was in the UK, I was in Germany. For three months, we corresponded by postal mail. This was pre-internet, pre everyone having a computer, or mobile phones, or whatever else you could name.
We’d barely progressed beyond carrier pigeons!
So.
What about today?
People correspond by text messages and emails.
Not very enduring for memories, is it?
There is something about seeing your loved one’s handwriting, knowing he or she took the time to put pen to paper and compose their thoughts, hopes, worries so you can read them. And seeing those letters twenty years later… wow. Amazing. I’m glad, very glad indeed, that my dad kept yelling "Write a postcard" the second I picked up the phone.
Do you think the lovers today, who keep texting back and forth, will still have those text messages in twenty years time? I doubt it.
So lets all just realize something.
The letter you write today is more than just a letter to a friend or a loved one. The letter you write today is a memory in the making, a record of your life, a snapshot in time which would otherwise be lost forever.
Get writing those letters, so my postman doesn’t have to knock on the door and hand deliver a letter with the words "You’re the only person on my round who still gets personal letters, hand written and hand addressed. I just wanted to see who they go to."
That’s the really scary part.
The postman noticed!
