BRATTLEBORO — Today, I picked up a pen. The kind you get 10 for a dollar.
And a pad, just like the pad we all used in school. The pad cost $1.49.
Then I wrote a letter.
If you are very young, you might never have written or held a letter in your hand. It is a missive between two people delivered by the post office anywhere in the United States for 46 cents. It is a way to connect with another that most anyone can afford.
As one friend writes, “You are the only friend I have who still writes letters and sends them with a stamp. I love it.”
I enclosed a tea bag in one of my letters to another friend, saying that receiving a letter from her was like sitting down to tea and talking. Since then, we both include a tea bag drawing at the end of each letter.
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I have, collected in boxes, letters written to me from aunts, uncles, my mother, my sister, my brother, and friends dating from the 1940s on. I have letters from my children chronicling their lives as they wrote from camp, from college, from various places they traveled to and from as they grew older.
One of my favorite letters says, “Your New Year's letter arrived in time to celebrate my 92nd birthday, which I actually didn't celebrate, as none of my family were here. Your 'determination to hold fast' was exactly the message I needed to counteract depressive thoughts - it's probably not a bad idea to take someone 30 years younger as a role model!”
And, I have been corresponding with a high school friend for 60-plus years. She lives in the West; I live in the East. I have all her letters stacked on my shelf.
These letters document our lives and our friendship. Something real that I can hold in my hand. The same hand that is connected to my inner being, that not only talks to my friend but helps me understand myself.
We describe the weather, what it is like to be in Yellowstone National Park, what it is like in Vermont on a minus-20-degree morning.
I describe the joy of a poem accepted for publication; the disappointment of a rejection. She tells me of collecting jade in a ghost town, of seeing bighorn sheep on a recent camping trip.
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Nowadays, we are helping each other grow older. With a lifetime of knowing each other, one sentence can evoke whole stories.
We can complain and yet know we are both survivors. We know we will keep putting one foot in front of the other no matter what the challenge. After all, we have been cheering each other on for a long time.
Today, the pen I pick up is inscribed “Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.” This gives me enough material to fill paragraph after paragraph.
Dear friend, I say, and I'm off.