"Dear..."

I recently finished reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, an epistolary book I recommend to anyone. It is a lovely story, well-written and sweet without being sickly. (Although it is easy to see where the plot is headed, it is equally easy to get lost in the characters.) While I enjoyed it, immensely, it made me miss letters, and the time when letter-writing was the norm.

Lest you think I have become nostalgic for a time I have never experienced, allow me to become an old woman for a moment: I remember the advent of the World Wide Web; when the now ubiquitous -- and expected -- business website was a novelty. I didn't have my own email account until I was 22. When I was in England, my family and I wrote letters -- that was how we communicated, and a large part of the joy for me of writing those letters was trying to determine which news and happenings deserved letter space. When I was in high school, I was not emailing my friends or texting my boyfriend: we were passing notes.

I miss that time. There is such a sense of connection when you read a letter that the other person has touched, when you can see their handwriting. By necessity, email has become a massive part of my work day, because it's faster, I text more than I talk on the phone, for convenience sake, I bank and shop online, and this blog is clearly not a handwritten missive. But I miss letters.

Perhaps it's time to write some.