I see their point, and I agree, to a point. There’s really nothing like a hand-written letter slipped through my mail slot to brighten my day, and I have a small precious bundle of correspondence from my friends and family over the years. Postings on my Facebook wall don’t seem like a really a good replacement for some of these. But realistically, hasn’t that ship pretty much sailed? There is probably no going back to the days when lengthy handwritten letters were the only way to reach out across the miles. So why not look at the bright side?

 

The flip side of electronic communication is that its ease and immediacy can actually create communication where it may not have existed before. Every day my inbox is flooded with notes from friends and family, notes that would never have been sent via regular mail. For example, my father would never have written me a letter, but he was a prolific emailer. For the past decade I got semi-weekly reports on the weather, the University of Arizona football and basketball teams, and the frequent appearance of bobcats and javelina in the yard. He also added me to the list of friends to whom he forwarded jokes – some that he would have been embarrassed to tell me in person (and should have been embarrassed to email!). About five years ago, for no particular reason, I started saving nearly every email my dad sent - I just printed them out and put them in a file. When he succumbed to cancer last year I realized that these messages were the only written communication I had from him, and what had started as an afterthought became a treasure, a priceless record of his last years.

 

I’m having a similar experience with my college son. He doesn’t know it (well, he didn’t until now) but I have a file on him too. We communicate via phone and text, but every so often he sends an email. These brief messages bear news from the classroom and the ski slopes, and reveal the exhiliration, stress and money woes of the undergraduate. His notes are not as frequent as my father’s were, and usually not quite as newsy, but I’m willing to bet that twenty years from now he will be interested in seeing what was on his mind as a college student. I save them so that one day he will have a better idea of who he once was.

 

Once the emails are saved there are any number of ways to preserve them: an electronic file, individually printed and stuck in a folder, or someone I know even prints all her daughter's emails once a year, puts them in a spiral binding with a decorative cover and gives them back to her daughter as a gift. Even if all you do is stick them in that box you are saving until your kid buys his first house, they will still be there, as far from ephemeral as the letter written with a quill pen in centuries past.

 

So before you hit that Delete button, think for just a second about the not-so-lost art of letter writing, and whether someone down the road might enjoy learning a little something about you and your life from a few of those messages in your inbox.

 

~ Kristi