L is for Letters —And Not a Love Letter in the Bunch

 

For the letter L in the A to Z Blog Challenge, I had a hard time choosing between Love and Letters. I wished I had a stack of love letters tied with a satin ribbon—something I could pull out and sigh over, combining both words into one tidy topic titled L is for Love Letters. But alas, while I’ve written and received hundreds of letters in my lifetime, not a single one qualifies as a love letter. 

I did once get a letter asking if there was any chance we could get back together—written a full year after a guy broke up with me. I kept that letter from the late ’60s until 2022, when I was downsizing for my move to Independent Living, what I called The Great Purging Project. A week later, I saw him for the first time since the breakup, at a funeral. How’s that for the universe laughing at me? We didn’t speak. I doubt he even saw me, and if he did, he probably wouldn’t have recognized me. He hadn’t changed a bit; I, on the other hand, had gained a lot of weight.

My first real letters—aside from those to Santa—were exchanged with a summer friend I met at the cottage. We were pen pals for four years. Another pen pal from my high school years was a boy I also met at the lake. During my downsizing, I became convinced he’d grown up to be a famous movie star. He lived in Georgia, I lived in Michigan, and after several years of writing, he moved and we lost touch. We were just friends, not boy‑girl friends, if you know what I mean. I thought about contacting the movie star, but what would I have said? “Hi, remember me? I’m the girl you sat in a tree with sixty‑plus years ago at your grandmother’s cottage.”

Another letter-writer from my past—a soldier in Vietnam—turned up living less than fifty miles away when I went looking. We had a brother/sister kind of correspondence, eight-to-ten-page letters about everything under the sun, including Twiggy. He had a girlfriend back home planning their wedding, and near the end of our exchanges he was giving me dating advice. (Apparently I wasn’t giving guys a fair chance. Who knew.) When I found his address in this century, I decided a voice from the past might cause trouble—especially if his wife was the jealous type. And, really, what did I expect? That I’d gain another brother figure in my life?

His letter bundle was part of a larger collection of letters I had to downsize out of my life, correspondence between me and 50—yes, fifty—G.I. Joe's stationed in Vietnam, circa 1967. I even had carbon copies of my own letters and index cards to keep track of everyone’s details. It all started one Christmas when I was in college and the local newspaper printed the addresses of servicemen who would welcome holiday cards. Over fifty guys wrote back asking about the perfume I sprayed on my envelopes. It was Avon’s Unforgettable, and I could probably write an entire essay quoting their comments. One guy said that at Mail Call the others passed my letters around before he could even open them. Another said any girl who “smells like that and has such beautiful handwriting has to be pretty.” Several said they carried my letters in their helmets—one to drown out the smell of jungle rot, another to “remember what girls smell like.”

What triggered me doing a deep dive into all my old correspondence was one of those serendipity moments that makes you believe the universe occasionally nudges things into place. During my Great Purging Project, the local senior hall hosted a speaker from The Million Letters Campaign, a museum collecting letters from servicemen from all the wars. During the Q&A, I asked if they’d want my whole collection or just the interesting ones. “Absolutely the whole thing,” he said. “Would you feel comfortable donating your copies too?” I told him I wanted to read them one last time, but yes—I’d donate everything. After spending winter nights reliving my life through those letters, I packed them up and sent them off. It felt right. As I often said during the Greats Purging Project, I wasn’t just selling and donating a lifetime of possessions—I was running an Antique and Collectibles Adoption Center.

I could go on writing about the decade of Christmas letters, the round‑robin chains, and the various pen pals who drifted in and out of my life but it seems enough to say that it wasn’t important who wrote to me, but who I became in writing back. By the time I discovered the blog community, it felt like another serendipitous pairing from the universe. Blogging is simply a bigger envelope to send off into the world. ©