Today I came across a great post at Ginny’s Small Studio about letter writing.

I miss writing letters. I miss receiving letters.

I miss the days of running to my College Post Office (CPO) box in anticipation of hand written letters from my parents and friends back home. I even miss the sense of loss when the CPO was empty. It made the days of finding letters inside even more special. I miss that tactile sensation of opening an envelope – like opening a gift – wondering what treasure of words, thoughts, stories and ideas lay inside.

My life-long friend Dave and I became friends through letters. I was in college as he was finishing up his last year of high school. I wrote him, he wrote back. I replied and he replied to my reply. We did not stop replying to each other. For years we faithfully wrote one another. Once, twice, three times a week we were journaling our lives, our thoughts, our passions and our foibles through letters and post cards. I went on into marriage and a career as he went on to study and teach in France. Still the letters continued.

Those letters are a treasured chronicle of that age of my life. The birth, growth and maturity of a friendship is right there in hundreds of envelopes on hundreds, if not thousands of pages covered in personal, handmade lines of ink and graphite.

I fear that our culture lost something when technology robbed us of letter writing.

Yes, e-mail is fast. Yes, e-mail is convenient. Yes, e-mail is cheap.

So is a prostitute.

The bytes and pixels of e-mail will never match the intimacy of a personal, handwritten letter.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and Aphrodite. By the way, that’s an iridium nibbed fountain pen making those letters [for those of you who’ve never seen one].