Letters again
Something has happened to my mail this year. There's more of it.
Not bills. Letters. Real ones, in envelopes, with stamps and handwriting. In a normal year I get maybe two personal letters a month, not counting my mother, who doesn't count because she writes every week and always has. Since April I've been getting two or three a week. Friends from college I hadn't heard from in years. A cousin in Bemidji. Kristin, who usually manages three lines on the back of a drawing, sent four pages in May, on her kids' drawing paper, with a crayon horse on the reverse of page three.
I think it's that everybody's home. People have time they didn't have, and nowhere to go, and a phone that's mostly bad news. A letter is a way to talk to someone that doesn't come with a headline attached. You sit down, you choose your words, you lick an envelope, and for twenty minutes you're somewhere else. I know that's how it works for me. Answering letters this spring has been the one part of every week I've looked forward to without reservation.
Some of them are new correspondents, too. A few people who wrote to me last year about the brother's grave quest have written again, not about the quest this time, but just to say how they're doing. One of them is a retired mail carrier in Oregon, who has very firm views about how to address an envelope, and who wrote to tell me his garden was the best it had ever been because he'd had nothing else to do. I've started to look forward to his letters the way you look forward to a show.
And there's something else I've noticed. People write differently this year. Longer, slower, more honest. When you can't see anyone, I think you say more on paper than you would across a table. A friend from my tabletop days wrote me two pages about her divorce, which she'd never mentioned in three years of phone calls. A man I worked with at my first job wrote about his father in a care home he can't visit. I've read every one twice and answered every one by hand, the way my mother taught me, and in the answers I've found myself saying things I wouldn't have said either.
I hope we keep this, after. I suspect most people won't. But some will, and I'll be writing back to them.