Barbara J. Hamby

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Take a Letter or Letters

For several years I have packed around a large plastic tub full of letters to and from family and friends. Several times I’ve started sorting them, then overwhelmed, abandoned the project.

Now I’m working on memoirs and my ancient memory is very fallible. So, in desperation, I’ve resumed re-reading and sorting letters to and from my three sisters who saved mine and returned them to me. I also have letters from my parents and other relatives and friends that I’ve saved

One of my sisters was a prolific letter writer, which I really appreciated, especially when our mother became terminally ill. In her dementia, she enjoyed reading those letters over and over again

Sorting that sister’s letters is a formidable task that I’ve postponed. But, I’ll certainly feel virtuous if I ever finish the project. She was the last to begin using email and we printed our exchanged emails and sent them to her by snail mail for a while. I have some of those, also.

This exercise proves to me again that we tend to remember the good times and forget the bad ones. Reading letters from the bad times in my life is difficult, but necessary to balance my recollections.

In recent years, our correspondence has been almost entirely by email. When I realized how much family history was being lost with each strike of a delete key, I began saving the emails from family and close friends in folders on my computer.

Without letters, in future years, historians and authors may have to depend on what personal journals are available to recall and record what life was like in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There is very little time available these days for collecting oral history from the elderly. World War II veterans may be the last group to be interviewed for that purpose.

Heaven forbid that history consist of interviews of movie stars and athletes.