A lost art

For much of their married life John and Abigail Adams were separated due to the politics of the era that they lived in.  He served as a circuit lawyer, a congressman in Colonial Congress, a congressman to the United States, an ambassador to Holland, France, and England, vice president, and eventually the 2nd president of the United States of America.  Abigail, one of a rare few educated women, stayed either in Braintree or in Boston, ran the family farm, and raised four children to adulthood, losing several more in infancy. Throughout their courtship, and marriage they wrote letters.  Not the short, overly saccharine, snippets that you might just as likely find in a hallmark card, but long, detailed, enamored letters that say something better than "I love you.  No, I love you more."  Their love was communicated through hundreds of tiny details and carried across borders, oceans, and decades.  

In Jane Austen's, Persuasion, Frederick Wentworth goes out of his way to write a letter to Anne, asking her to reconsider and see if she still has feelings for him.  (Plot spoiler: she does.)

When my grandmother found out her high school boyfriend's mother had passed away, she wrote him a letter of comfort and empathy.  She hadn't seen him since he got back from Vietnam and she missed him. They were married shortly after that.  

I love letter writing.  I think it is one of the great tragedies of our time that the youth of today don't know how to write a letter.  Sure, they can all text a mile a minute, but how often can they write something in the proper format of a letter, let alone with the proper punctuation and grammar?  Can they even write something with thought?  

My best friend and I became friends through letters.  She lived in Michigan when I lived in California.  Then she moved to Texas and I moved to Florida.  Finally I moved to Texas to be closer to her and two weeks later she moved to Virginia.  (Are we noticing a pattern?)  The one constant in our lives, through boyfriends, jobs, weddings, and babies, has been those letters.  Whenever I have a bad day I go back to those early letters and remember who we were back then.  It is a joy to see how far we have come, and it is only possible through those letters.  

We need to break away from the world of instant gratification- of texting and IMing, and not waiting for any answer.  Sometimes it's the wait that makes the letters so much sweeter- having known that someone took the time to sit down and complete a thought process and make it look nice, in a letter.