A card from Ohio

Every December a card comes from Ohio. It's always a cardinal, the state bird, on snow, and it's always written edge to edge in blue ink in a hand that was taught by someone who meant it. This year's came on Wednesday. It's the fifth.

It's from a reader, a retired schoolteacher who found this blog through a post about letters, and who has written to me every December since. I won't say more about her than that, because she didn't ask to be written about. But I want to say something about what she's given me, which is a friendship made almost entirely of paper.

We've never met. We've never spoken on the phone. I know her handwriting better than I know the faces of some people I've worked beside for years. I know what she grows, which grandchildren call, and what she thought of a book I recommended in 2019 (not much, kindly put). She knows more about my mother's garden than most of my friends in Seattle do. Once a year we bring each other up to date, and in between she sometimes leaves a comment here, and that's the whole of it. It is a real friendship. I'd be hurt if anyone said otherwise.

She has written to a woman in Lancashire every month for twenty-six years. They've met twice. When she told me that, I understood how she'd been able to make something so warm out of a card a year. She has had practice.

My mother would approve of all of it, and does. Her rules for letters were the first rules I ever learned that weren't about crossing the street. Answer within the week. Date it in full, because someone may keep it. Never type a thank-you. Write the way you'd talk to them if they were across the table, and then cut a third of it. I still follow every one, though the last one is honored mostly in the breach.

I answered today, on the good paper, at the kitchen table with the lamps on. It'll go out tomorrow and get there after Christmas, as it always does, and she'll forgive me for that, as she always does.

Is there someone you know mostly, or only, through what they've written to you?