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Tuesday, March 29, 2022

Letters

 


I remember when  a stamp cost two cents,
and the letter my mother wrote to me in Vancouver
arrived next day in Kelowna.
Now mailing a letter costs a dollar-five,
and takes most of a week to travel
an hour and a half away, now that
mechanization has "improved" things
so that it has to be driven down-Island first, 
and get sorted to turn around
and come back up.

I remember all the years as a young mother,
typing fat missives to my mom and my friends,
how we'd send them off, packed with our daily doings,
and, in a week or two, would receive
a fat letter back full of their
last two weeks. We knew how to wait then.
It was what life was, much of it.

My kids went to sleep and woke up
to the sound of me typing those letters,
so important was it to share all the life
we were living.

Email just isnt the same. It is immediate,
but transitory. Mundane, not special.
I once saved letters;
no one saves emails. They are informal,
everyday. No one pretends emails
can ever reach literary heights as,
sometimes, our letters did.
No one prints books of the emails
of well-known writers.

I remember when a stamp cost two cents.
They cost a dollar-five now. No one
writes letters any more. And email
just isn't the same.

Inspired by "The Letter, 1968" by Marie Howe, printed recently in the New Yorker. The italicized lines are hers.



3 comments:

  1. I feel as you do. There was something wonderful about receiving a letter in the mail. You are right - no one saves emails. Kind of sad really that so much thought that goes into emails now is just lost, unlike paper letters which can be savored for decades.

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  2. You must be going around from blog to blog imploring visits to YOUR blog. You visited mine as well. And how many others????

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  3. I have printed and saved some e-mails...I'm told stamps cost 3 cents when I was born. When I started writing letters they'd just gone up to 13 cents. But yes, the cost of postage (and burden of junkmail, on which the post office now depends!) now make a real letter a special event.

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