Putting Pen to Paper
I am not at all sure when it happened, but sometime after my generation became real adults, people mostly stopped writing. Both of my children, now aged 33 and 27, learned handwriting in school, and I know my older child was taught cursive, but I am not so sure about my younger child. Of course they know how to write, but I think they really do not write all that much, certainly not as much as I did at their age. Of course, what I am doing right this second is called writing, but what I am talking about here is writing by hand.
Some of the books I have been reading lately have me thinking back to not all that long ago when sending and receiving letters in the mail was a very common experience for most of us. I always had at least a couple of different kinds of stationery on hand and dreamed of the day when I would be adult enough to have monogrammed, nice stationery. My childhood best friend always spent most of the summer in another state either going to summer camp or staying with her grandparents, so we wrote letters nearly every day. I had some long-distance sweethearts back in those days and phone calls were very expensive, so the letters flew back and forth. My dad was in the military and spent a year in Vietnam, so the thin, crinkly airmail envelopes with the blue and red pattern around the edges would come in every few days.
There is something so very personal about a hand-written letter. A person’s hand-writing is unique and recognizable and often reveals the writer’s state of mind or emotion. Handwriting allows for much more expression than typewritten words. Sometimes a handwritten letter even smells like the writer or the home in which it was written. Handwriting is harder to perfect so there are normally misspellings or at least scratched out or erased words, and sometimes little symbols like arrows to guide the reader. One thing I have noticed is that I have a much easier time typing something that is emotionally difficult rather than handwriting it. Typing seems to put some distance between me and the unpleasant “it” while handwriting is far too close.
I have many handwritten treasures here—my grandmother’s inscription on the inside of a book she gave me nearly 50 years ago, my father-in-law’s beautiful handwriting in letters and notebooks, my daughter’s notes and artwork she used to stick to the wall on my side of the bed, my mother-in-law’s and mother’s handwritten recipe cards, the Mother’s Day card my son made me in kindergarten, letters written to me by my husband back before we were married, the letter written to me by a local friend when she ran across a stash of 1970’s era stationery and thought about me.
In the past few months I have been writing more—making notes in my sketchbooks, in the margins of books, in various journals, even on quilt blocks and backs. I aim to start back with the letter writing. I think it is because of that urge to “leave a legacy” as so many have left for me. I hope it comes back into style, and I want to do my part to make that happen.