Dearest readers,
I am doing something today that most Americans haven’t done in at least five years.
Or, they may never have done it at all.
Or, even if they did it in the past, they may never do it again.
I’m writing a personal letter. To you.
In the year 2022, writing a personal letter has become a rare endeavor.
A YouGov poll commissioned by CBS News and published in September 2021 found that only 31 percent of Americans in the survey sample had written a personal letter in the previous year, while 37 percent had not written one in more than five years and 15 percent had never written one at all.
To qualify, the letter had to be sent in the mail (not by email, not by text). So, how does my personal letter to you meet the guidelines? You receive the Leader in your mailbox, right? There you go.
Ages of survey participants ranged from 18 to 65 and older. Not at all surprisingly, younger people (under age 45) made up the majority of folks who have yet to try writing a letter.
Perhaps more surprisingly, the survey showed that many senior adults used to write letters, but don’t anymore, at about the same percentage as people who are decades younger.
Raising my hand. That’s me.
I’m a non-letter-writing grandmother who formerly wrote letters to my boyfriend (now husband), to my mother and mother-in-law, to my sisters and to my friends, even to my piano teacher.
And all of those people wrote back to me.
Last night, I went through my “memory box” (a dilapidated black case my father used for peddling Fuller Brush products a half-century ago) and reread many of the letters I received in those past decades, as well as many I wrote (since my husband, bless his heart, kept all the ones I sent him).
Tears came to my eyes several times as I walked through those distant slices of life. I can’t say the letters stirred memories, because at this stage, I remember the headlines of my life, not the minutiae. And those letters were dripping with day-to-day details.
So mundane, yet so rich, so meaningful.
Among the collection was my mother-in-law’s last letter to us, just six weeks before she died of cancer at age 63. She wrote of cooking a leg of lamb for her 8-year-old granddaughter’s birthday and failing in her umpteenth attempt at German chocolate cake. She asked about our oldest son’s first day of kindergarten and reported her memories of when her firstborn took that important step.
There was nothing heavy in the letter, but it resonates as a sweet reminder of her love for us before she had to leave.
I started this letter with the salutation “dearest” because that’s the term my mother-in-law always used.
The box had two birthday missives from my baby sister, probably 10 or so at the time: “Thank you for being a nice sister to me all my life,” said one. “Tell Amber (our long dead, but favorite cat) I’m glad she likes my ball. I never played with it.”
We lost my sister in 2021, but that letter brought her back.
A letter from me to boyfriend Gordon told of another sister’s high school Christmas concert solo and how she and I went Christmas shopping together in “Greenie,” the family’s Mercury Comet. No memories of those activities surface, but they live again on the written page.
My mother wrote a weekly letter to me when I went away to college (and to my older siblings who left home before me). It was what her generation did, trained up by their parents.
I was reminded of this a few days ago when my cousin, Carolyn, who has been painstakingly chronicling our family’s history, unearthed a post card from 1911, sent from my grandfather to his mother.
Lewis Akins, then 22, had left his Danby home to pursue itinerant employment and knew his mother needed to hear from him.
“Arrived here (St. Louis) OK this morning. Had a fine trip. We stopped off at Festus and came up on the Iron Mountain (a train?). Prospects good for work. Bye Bye.”
I never met my grandfather, who died of cancer when my mother was 19.
Carolyn carefully placed the card between two sturdy sheets of paper and mailed it to me. I can’t exactly say why it means so much to see my grandfather’s handwriting, and to know that he took the time to reassure his mother of his well-being when away from home.
But it does.
Emails aren’t bad, and neither is texting, which provides “at this very moment” communication.
But there’s nothing like a letter, a personal one, for putting thoughts down on paper and sending them out into the world, showing the recipient that you really care.
While writing this one to you, I’ve thought of others who need to hear from me in just that way.
And I resolve they will.
As always,
Your friend,
Peggy
