A letter a week

I write at least one letter a week, by hand, on paper, with a stamp. Usually more than one. I'm told this is eccentric. I live in a city where people pay for their coffee with their watches, so I suppose it is.

It's my mother's fault. When I was growing up, every letter that came to our house got an answer, by hand, within the week. Not a card with a line in it. A letter. Thank-you notes, yes, but also the long wandering ones from her cousin in Bemidji, and the Christmas letters from men my father had sailed with, and once, memorably, a letter from a stranger who had the wrong address and wanted to know if we'd seen his dog. She answered that one too. She said it was the least she could do, and that she hadn't seen his dog.

She had rules. She still does. I've never seen them written down, but I could recite them in my sleep.

A letter that comes by hand, you answer within the week. After that it becomes a debt, and debts grow. You put the whole date at the top, day and month and year, because people keep letters longer than they mean to, and someday someone will want to know when. You answer every question they asked before you say a word about yourself. You never begin by apologizing for taking so long. Everyone takes too long, and an apology fills the first paragraph and leaves the other person feeling they were a burden, so just begin. And you end with a question, so they have something to answer. That one I seem to have taken a little too much to heart.

Who do I write to? My mother, every week, though we talk on Sundays too. She says a phone call isn't the same because you can't keep it, and she's right. A friend from college in Minneapolis, who has two kids and a nursing job and writes back on the backs of their drawings, which I prefer to stationery. A man in Two Harbors who cooked on the same boat as my father for eleven years, and who writes to me twice a year in capital letters. A woman I met at a tabletop convention years ago, who now lives in Glasgow and sends me postcards of ugly buildings. My high school English teacher, who still corrects my grammar in the margins, in green.

And sometimes people I don't know. Once you start, it's hard to stop.

Why bother? Partly habit. Partly because I spend my days writing words that will be read by a great many people I'll never meet, and it's good, at the end of the week, to write some that will be read by one person I know, at their kitchen table, with coffee. A letter is the opposite of a game. It goes to one place. Nobody can patch it.

Mostly, though, it's that a letter is slow, and I like having one slow thing in my week. You sit down. You can't delete. You think before you write the sentence, because the sentence is going to stay there, in ink, in somebody's drawer.

Who was the last person you wrote to by hand? Did they write back?