Letters Home

I wrote a letter today.

Actually put pen to stationery, addressed the envelope, stuck a stamp on it and mailed it. And I was struck by the fact that I could not remember the last time I had done such a thing.

Oh sure, I send out birthday and sympathy cards, thank-you notes. But this was a real letter to a friend, and I did it because strangely, it didn’t seem right to e-mail, not personal enough.

It made me think about some of the letters I have sent and been sent in my life. It made me go hunting for my daughter Amanda’s letters from her first and only attempt at overnight camp.

She was 10 years old and it was only a two-week stay. I say “only” because where I live, kids are shipped out for eight-week tours of duty at the age of seven and don’t blink – neither the kids nor the parents.

My kids, however, come from indoor, stay-at-home stock. My family used to love to tell about the time my father had to drive downtown to go pick me up from the apartment of my aunt – whom I loved – because I couldn’t grasp the concept that the overnight visit meant I would be spending the night.

When Amanda decided to try overnight camp the first time, we did not know whether to laugh or cry over her letters home.

The first one, which was delivered a mere two days after her arrival in Lake Delton, Wis., began:

Dear Mom and Dad,

I am suffering emotionally and physically.

A week later, she detailed her distress further by informing us that she had not yet eaten, writing:

My stomach is as fragile as a potato chip.

The thing is, you’d have to see her shaky little handwriting on her cheery rainbow stationery to fully appreciate both the heartbreak and hilarity of what we were reading.

I watch now as both of my children compose almost all of their letters and school essays on the computer, and I actually miss their handwriting.  

And then, as much as I’d rather not, I am drawn to the wooden box where I keep the letters from my mother that I found when we packed up my parents’ house for the last time.

I had saved all the letters I had received in college and brought them home, where my mom, who threw out everything including anything resembling a leftover and my favorite jeans, had saved them. I guess she understood how important they were to me, even more than my jeans.

I just couldn’t throw them out – not the long ones from friends telling me about their new classes and their old boyfriends, and not the short ones from my very funny mother.

My freshman year, she barely missed a day, sending most on the same stationery but cleverly switching up the name on the return address so as not to embarrass me. Surely, my roommates would laugh if they saw endless correspondence from my mother to her homesick daughter. But they would definitely be impressed and maybe even jealous when they saw the ones on the same pink stationery from Tom Selleck and Robert Redford.

I look at the envelopes now and the sight of her familiar handwriting washes over me with a feeling of warmth and sadness that is beyond my power to describe. I open one up randomly, and I see:

My Dear Love,

And I can barely stand it.

Then I read her words and immediately I am hysterical. Laughing. I have been away at college for barely a month, my first extended stay away from home, and she is clearly trying to keep my mind away from this horrible place they have sent me to.

She is sorry, she writes, but she is thinking of cutting back to a letter every other day. “I can’t possibly be funny every day,” she explains.

I put it back in the box because I know if I start reading them, I will not stop. And then I go back up to my laptop where I try to pump humor and warmth onto a computer screen.

And I’m sorry, but it’s just not the same.