Love Letter

I got a letter in the mail yesterday. It might well have been a love letter, from my overjoyed reaction. It was from the mother of a friend of my son’s. She lives about 300 miles from me but even when we were in the same town, I didn’t know her very well though her son and mine have been close friends since they were in junior high school. She wrote about her recent vacation with her family on the Oregon Coast and included a couple of scanned photos taken from the trip. She said she uses a cane these days but continues to maintain an active membership in her local gardening club. Different varieties of roses were more than a hobby for her and her husband, who died several years ago. She knows I like to read and included a list of books she had enjoyed and asked if I had any recommendations for her. It was a letter of chitchat, the kind of thing a lot of us used to send to friends and family members back in “the day”. Her handwriting occupied both sides of two large-ish pages of stationery and it was lovely to hold the paper while I read. I had a pen pal from another town when I was in the sixth grade and it was fun but it fizzled after a while. I write a lot of letters via email these days but had forgotten the joy of a personal newsy handwritten document. Not a birthday or Christmas card with just a signature. Nothing to do with any legality. Not a notification of something due or past due. Not an invitation to join any sort of chain letter. Just an old-fashioned thinking-of-you, hey-howya-doin’. Nice.

Photo courtesy geric10 at Pixabay.com