My letter-writing ritual started in 2005 when my daughter, Caitlin, left to attend college in another part of the country. She was my hiking buddy since the time she could walk. Together we left our boot tracks, one size 10 and the other barely longer than the width of my palm, over the soft paths through local woodlands and meadows. We explored the bugs along the shoreline mud of tiny ponds in spring, popped Jewelweed seedpods in late summer, and made Goldenrod and Aster bouquets in the fall. As she grew older and stronger, our hikes became longer and more challenging. A dozen or so outgrown and worn-out boots later, she moved away. I wrote to her weekly, describing a new trail I had discovered, how our beehives were doing, family news, unsolicited financial advice, or just pointless chatter that translated into “I miss you” and “I love you.” Often in the fall I stuffed at least one letter with the colors of home – yellow Paper Birch leaves, red and orange Sugar Maple leaves, and a few brown and rust-colored Red Oak leaves.

My son Sam never wandered more than 30 miles from home. But with his intense work schedule and new family, our time fishing or fall gunning for partridge all but disappeared. He may as well live a thousand miles away.  The letters keep us grounded.

Bridget, my youngest, took a circuitous route after high school, spending a few years in Kentucky, then in upstate New York before obtaining a permanent address in northern Worcester County. She insists on letters, too.

Shortly after I met Val’s mother in 2009, Val and I clicked and bonded as family. I like to say that Val adopted me from the lost and found bin fourteen years ago when she was twenty-four years old, and I was forty-eight. We formed our own private book club, just between the two of us. We exchange books, mostly about current events or about art, on our birthdays and every Christmas, then discuss them, often through the handwritten word. My weekly letters have followed her from Boston to Arkansas to the west coast.  

Every Sunday morning, I pour myself a cup of tea, then commit five conversations to paper – all individually handwritten using blue ink, assuring them that home, unconsciously imprinted on them from such a young age, is still here, regardless of where they now reside. I’ve encouraged them in their own daily challenges and griped about my own. And I’ve helped a few of them deal with their grandmother, my mother, as she slips further and further into dementia. Sometimes I’ve written a simple message to the ones living nearby: “When can we get together for a pizza?” Occasionally, I’ll get a letter written back to me, although I never expect that from any of them.

Those family and friends who know of my letter writing tell me I am an anachronism. “You were born in the wrong century,” they say. “Why don’t you just call or text them?” 

My reply? Why attend a baseball game when you can watch it on tv? 

Because it’s a different experience. It’s holding a letter passed from one hand to another. It’s “listening” to the penmanship, the personal font, as unique as the letter-writer’s voice. And while I do call, text, and email them often, never has anyone of them asked me to ditch the letters and go digital instead. Never. Quite the contrary. If my letter arrives late, almost always because of a delay with the U.S. Postal Service, I will get a call: “You okay? I should have received your letter two days ago!”

Not everything needs to be spelled out in these letters and cards. History and time fill in the blanks. They are tangible conversations which can be read and reread, a simple memory aid, or perhaps a metaphorical gentle touch from my hand to theirs, all for only the cost of a few minutes time and a first-class stamp.

Writing to Val in December 2016, about who put her favorite childhood Sleeping-Mouse-in-the-Hammock ornament on the Christmas tree in her absence, was not just about the ornament. It was a few simple sentences assuring her that the holiday tradition continues, even if separated by three thousand miles. Val knows her mother and I first cut the Christmas tree, followed by the annual comedy routine of trying to tie it to the roof of the car. Later, while decorating the tree with all the other ornaments, we listen to Christmas carols, drink hot chocolate, and eat take-out Thai food. Then, as Val’s proxy, her mother places the Sleeping-Mouse-in-the-Hammock ornament between the boughs of the fir tree under a string of softly glowing green, red, yellow, and blue lights.

Or writing to Sam in October 2017 about the scent of wild concord grapes and the nutty smell of the dry fallen autumn leaves in the woods that time of the year. I knew he would travel back with me to that same patch of land we had bird hunted in dozens of times and would fill in with his own memories of those frosty mornings, his Labrador Retriever flushing coveys of partridge, and of our father/son conversations – whether spoken or unspoken that helped bind us together.

I’ve written several thousand letters to the “kids” since 2005. A few have special boxes to store their letters in from me. Erin has my valediction, the closing two words of my letters to her, in my handwriting, tattooed on her wrist: Love, Dad

So, this Sunday morning while the tea is steeping, I’ll choose a card or piece of stationary, then think for a short time about which one I will write to next, picture his face, remember her laugh, say a prayer for each one of them…

And only after I am ready, I will put my pen to the paper.