"My Dearest Friend..." by Helen DePrima and Liz Flaherty

Do you write letters? Even if you don't, I'll bet you love getting them, don't you? It's one of those things, like cursive writing, that I hope comes back into style. 




by Liz Flaherty

At a writers’ group meeting the other day, Pam, one of the other writers who has a writing voice so deep and poetic I cringe with envy every time she writes, said she’d been writing letters. “Oh,” I said, “it’s a lost art.” And I realized that whether it was a lost art or not, I’d certainly lost it.

I worked at the post office for 30 years, watching the amount of personal mail drop almost on a weekly basis. There were still lots of greeting cards, especially at Christmas, Mother's Day, and Valentine's day, but not so many letters addressed to colleges, military installations, nursing homes and senior living complexes. It was a sad lessening, a step away from an important way of communicating.

My friend Judith and I still exchange letters three or four times a year. We used to meet for lunch, and I miss that, but in all honesty, I would miss the letters more. If she reads this, I hope she realizes she owes me one. Or maybe she doesn't...but if she thinks she does...

I used to have pen pals, didn’t you? And I wrote to school friends in the summer because country kids didn’t see the others from May until September except for 4-H meetings and church. I wrote to my aunt and my grandma and to siblings if they were living far away.


When my boyfriend was in Vietnam, I wrote to him. All these years later, I still write him notes sometimes. He reads them and puts them away in his dresser drawer. He doesn’t write notes to me, but is the master of choosing just the right card for any occasion or, better yet, any non-occasion.

I have my parents’ letters to each other, written before they married. I wish I could have known the people they were then, seen the relationship they shared, felt the love they had for each other. It was different by the time I came along. They’d lost a beloved child and, I think, too much of themselves to ever recover.

I've read some of John and Abigail Adams' letters. "Remember the ladies" led me to them! But I love how he began letters to her--"My dearest Friend..." Letters are dreams on paper, aren’t they? They’re memories and information and secrets and cherished conversations you can read again and again and again. They’re stories that might never have been told if someone hadn’t addressed a letter.

I hope you’re having a wonderful day and that you’ll write and tell someone about it. They’ll be so glad to hear from you.


by Helen DePrima
Don’t get me wrong – I love using email. I keep in touch with family and friends much more reliably than I would if I had to find stationery and stamps and my address book. Still, a mechanical voice announcing, “You’ve got mail!” can’t compare with the pleasure, sometimes the thrill or the dread of finding an envelope in the mailbox, the moments of anticipation before opening an honest-to-God letter. Tear it open still standing at the end of the driveway? Sit down with a cup of coffee (or something stronger) before reading the message? Share the moment with someone special, for celebration or support?


One of my most prized possessions is a slim binder filled with nine months’ worth of letters my mother wrote to my father while he was serving during WWII. My mother wrote long newsy bulletins from the Home Front – gas rationing, sugarless cake recipes, how to mend nylon stockings – as well as who had gone to serve, who was home on furlough, who was never coming home. The first one begins with the greeting, Dear Daddy . . . The last is a letter of sympathy from the pastor of their church in Louisville following my mother’s death in childbirth. If the house ever catches fire, that notebook and the box containing my father’s letters to her are the first things I save.

My husband and I dated for five years before we married, with many months
apart during summer breaks from college and then a year separated by more than a thousand miles while he established legal residency in Colorado and I finished nursing school in Rochester, New York. Loneliness and longing, wedding plans and the occasional misunderstanding requiring an expensive long-distance call to resolve. I still have most of those letters; they make me smile and sometimes wipe a tear at all that young passion.

Now my only snail-mail correspondence is with a dear friend in her 90’s whose computer has died and looks forward to my letters in her mailbox. I’m happy to be part of a great tradition.

Comments

  1. Your posts remind me of my excitement as a child and teen when a letter or card came in the mail for me. Then as an adult, the type of mail I got changed to business letters and credit card bills! After my father passed away, I found a love letter from him to my mother during WWII, the only one she kept I guess. It showed me a side of my Dad I never knew...poetic, sentimental and romantic. I wish I’d found it when he was still alive. Lovely post, ladies!

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    1. Thanks, Janice. I remember when my brothers were in the military--I would rush the mailbox on a daily basis. Not that they wrote that often, but it was always exciting when a letter came.

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    2. My husband has no correspondence between his parents -- they were never apart enough to write -- but my mother-in-law saved many greeting cards from the 30's and 40's. I love the old-fashioned style and flowery sentiments. Maybe someone in the future will enjoy these nostalgic bits of ephemera.

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  2. Love these posts. I so wish I had more of the wonderful letters from my past. I came across a letter from one of my best friends. She died a few years ago and I was touched just seeing her handwriting. It's no accident letters show up in so many novels, and remember "A Woman of Independent Means." It was entirely a series of letters. I have various collections of letters on my book shelves and I'm always grateful they were preserved and published for historians and curious people like me. Thanks so much.

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    1. Letters as theater work so well -- I'm thinking especially the play Love Letters. I've seen that performed several times, most notably by James Whitmore and his ex-wife Audra Linley at the Peterborough Players.

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    2. Letters are truly a gift that keeps on giving. While I admit to sometimes feeling a little voyeuristic, I do enjoy reading them.

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  3. I still have a dozen or so readers who correspond with me via snail mail. I keep a mailbox at UPS store for that reason. We've developed long distance "family" friendships even though we've never met. I try to write letters to them once a month at least since most are more elderly than me. I may have mentioned before that troop trains stopped near our home during WWII. My mom took coffee and cookies to the men (all men then) on the train. They all wanted her to write to them, so she did. And they wrote back. I wish I'd kept those letters. They came from all over. All had been opened and read before she got them. Sometimes parts were blacked out. Every one of them said how grateful they were that she reliably wrote to them, often when their families dropped away. Maybe they couldn't afford airmail stamps. I don't think my grandchildren know how to write letters, although they do send cards. Love this post. Reminds me I have letters to write.

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    1. Lucky you, having that kind of correspondence. I was on the other end of such a relationship when I wrote a fan letter to Gladys Hasty Carroll, a marvelous Maine writer. We exchanged letters while I was on extended "deployment" caring for my aunt in Kentucky for close to a year. When I finally returned home, I wrote asking if I could bring my collection of her books for her to sign. She wrote back that she would be happy to "inscribe" the books if I would care to visit. I spent a wonderful afternoon with her at her family's farm in South Berwick; her daughter wrote a few months later that her mother had died at age 87, just my aunt's age when I lost her. I attended an auction at her home a few months after her death and brought home hand-hooked rug dated 1006 and a pumpkin-pine chest, wonderful reminders of a special afternoon. I keep Mrs. Carroll's letters in the books she inscribed for me, a sweet reminded of our relationship when I reread my favorites.

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    2. Roz, Such a lovely story about your mom! She sounds like a kind and compassionate lady. You need to put this in a book, if you haven't already!

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    3. I love both Roz's and Helen's stories. I always remember that the first "fan letter" I ever sent was to Muriel Jensen. If she hadn't answered as kindly as she did, I might never have pursued publication.

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  4. Ladies, This brought tears to my eyes. Both of your memories are so touching. I'm one of those people who longs for simpler times. These days, it feels like people (including myself) are too busy doing things that don't really matter. I think letter writing is a good reminder of what's important in life - people and relationships.

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    1. A wake-up call for me to write some letters. I lost my oldest friend from nursery school last year. We kept in touch with phone calls, but Pam absolutely refused to use email, and I didn't write as often as I should have. A favorite cousin has taken the same stand, so I need to send her a real letter. Her hands are too arthritic to write so we found her a perfectly-functioning old Selectric typewriter, which she loves.

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    2. Thank you, Carol. I'm like you in yearning for at least some of the things from simpler times. How great that you got your cousin a Selectric, Helen. I have cherished memories of when we got them at the office where I worked--we all got extremely territorial about our typewriters! :-)

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  5. I've never been one to write letters, but I do make my own get-well and encouragement cards. Or at least I used to before I got so busy. And that's sad. I think I'll go make one now for a friend. Thanks for the reminder! Oh, I do have letters written from a soldier during WWII to his family and I treasure it.

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    1. I wish I made cards, but I can't seem to muster either the patience or the talent, but I do love getting them! Thanks for coming by, Pat.

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    2. One of my "bonus" daughters, my daughter's best friend from high school, has invited me to join her for a card-making workshop. Sounds like fun, maybe a nice activity to hold in reserve for the long cold days.

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  6. I love your stories. My future husband had no phone the summer he was working in Wyoming and I was attending college in Texas. We wrote almost daily. I have those letters tucked away somewhere. I won't be letting my children read them. My cousin and I wrote to each other as children. I loved getting those letters. Maybe I should go write her a letter on paper now.

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    1. Duane and I did that when he was in Vietnam--don't think I'd have wanted the kids to see some of them, either. He and I did have a fight once, via mail, and didn't write for a couple of miserable months. When we both gave in and wrote, our letters crossed in the mail. I'll bet your cousin will be happy to hear from you!+

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    2. I love that your letters crossed! You were meant to be.

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  7. I wish I had saved my pen pal's letter from grade school. She lived in an affluent Detroit suburb and came for a visit one summer. Gracious knows what she thought of my grandfather's slightly down-at-the heels farm, but we had horses and ponies and goats and chickens and a huge old barn . . . Probably went home thinking how lucky I was. And I was.

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  8. I have letters from my mom and my little sisters from when I went to summer camp and as the first one to go to college. I gave my little sisters back their letters now that they are over fifty. They loved them. I have two letters written by my father that I'll always treasure. Not sure letter writing will catch back on with the generation who aren't much for delayed gratification. They don't know what they're missing. Loved the post. Thanks for sharing.

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    1. Thank you! And it's sad, but you're right--they don't know what they're missing.

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  9. I have letters between my mom and dad when they were courting. So many insights to who they were and what they dreaming/hoping for in their marriage. My mother thought the letters had been lost and was very upset. Sadly, they were found in a gardening shed (of all things) after she passed away. I think my brothers had dumped a few things in there in a spirit of helpfulness, without really looking at what was in the boxes...like her wedding dress. But she was much more concerned about the letters than she was about the dress.

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    1. Oh, that's sad. I found Mom and Dad's after she passed away, too. I think she knew where they were, but she never mentioned them. She was very, very private, and I felt like a voyeur while I read them, but I'm still glad I did.

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