When was the last one written, I wonder. Where is it now? Tied up in ribbon, tucked in a drawer or keepsake box, lost in an attic trunk. Once cherished, love letters, their lasting endearments, may be no more.
There are things to be thankful for about communicating with technology, but much is lost. No sweetheart can tie up an email file with blue ribbon or twine and hold it next to her heart, or his. No string of texts, however sweet, can grow yellow with age, or be read again and again over the decades then be refolded and slipped into a tattered, postmarked envelope for safekeeping.
A heart cannot throb with the same thrill at the arrival of an electronic message as it might with the arrival of a letter on familiar stationary in a hand a lover knows as well the face of the loved one. No lock of hair, or scrap of lace, poem or photograph could ever be more meaningful than as a love token in a letter. No perfume ever smelled as sweet as that which scents a sweetheart’s missive.
It is a sad loss if love letters disappear even if life must go on and things must change as they always have. Change now happens with a rapidity that leaves us no time to mourn what has passed. Some things lost leave a greater void than others, like that of a fine art piece vanished from the enjoyment and enrichment of humanity.
A college sweetheart wrote a letter a day to me one year, sometimes two. And I returned the sentiments matching each with one of my own. Sitting at our small desks in shared rooms far from each other we poured out our hearts, named our dreams, and planned life and love. I can still recall the daily joy of receiving that love note. Some days I could not wait to return to my room and stopped at a bench under a tree to read words I could have recited without looking. At the end of that year we married. I sometimes think we were more in love in our letters than together. The marriage did not last and when it ended, I burned the letters in a ceremonious goodbye.
My mother, more recently, burned the bundles of letters my father wrote to her from overseas when he was away fighting in a war from which he did not return. She is in her nineties. She kept them in a trunk in the attic. I asked why, after so many years, she did not preserve them for her children. She said they were for her alone and she wanted to keep them in her heart.
I understand. Love letters touch something in the recipient that no other exchange can mimic. To know one is thought of with fondness and affection over miles and time, that the one who holds your heart has paused and taken time to choose just the right words, just the right sheet of stationary, just the right token to slip between the folded pages, and has made sure not to miss the postman, is enough to weaken any knee and make a lasting mark on any heart.
Greeting cards are sweet but they are not as straight from the heart as words penned especially for another. Love letters are romance. Love letters are valentines that do not need a special day or sweet rhyming lines. They are deeper, truer. They are love captured, preserved in ink and paper, worthy of being tied in satin ribbon and kept through the ages. They may be, may become, only a practice of the past but if we are wise, the writing of love letters will not become a lost art.
With love,
Andrea Parnell
Postscript: TOPIC is in the Air! SEE: http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/10/opinion/bauerlein-love-letters/
“Did Facebook kill love letters?”