Sometimes I think about writing paper letters regularly again. Something like once or twice a month maybe, just short notes to different people I used to correspond with that way. Even those of us who used to create voluminous amounts of paper letters – and I did – don’t do so any more. I keep up the volume of postcards, but not letters. I toy with this idea, but nothing has come of it yet.

That came to mind rummaging through my letter files recently. I found this.

Twenty years ago, my 78-year-old mother in Texas writes to her six-year-old granddaughter in Illinois, whose 26-year-old self happens to be visiting us now. I don’t think my mother sent an email or text message in her life, and she was no worse for it. I’d say as long as this paper letter and others of hers are accessible to those of us who knew her, her memory is no worse for it either.