Analog Mail: A Month of Letters

Jason Dean/Flickr

Remember when letters from your grandma or your best friend took days to get to you? You checked the mailbox religiously, hoping to find an envelope or a post card with your name on it? If you were a kid, getting your own mail made you feel like a grown up. If you were an adult, it was a welcome deviation from a box full of bills and catalogs.

Don’t remember any of that? Chances are you are a child of the digital age. Communication is almost instant. You and your friend across the ocean can email/text back and forth with the only pauses being for bathroom breaks or sleep. (We all know we don’t stop emailing or texting for something as basic as eating.)

Lately I’ve begun to miss old-fashioned letters. My husband and I will go days without checking the mail because, after all, it will just be a bunch of junk and a few magazines. (With the advent of ebills and autopay, we rarely get bills now.) It’s kinda sad, if you think about it.

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Last week, I heard about a project that is exactly what I need: A Month of Letters.

In the month of February, mail at least one item through the post every day it runs. Write a postcard, a letter, send a picture, or a cutting from a newspaper, or a fabric swatch.
Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items.

All you are committing to is to mail 23 items. Why 23? There are four Sundays and one US holiday. In fact, you might send more than 23 items. You might develop a correspondence that extends beyond the month.

Write love letters, thank yous, or simply notes to say that you miss an old friend. Let yourself step away from the urgency of modern life and write for an audience of one. You might enjoy going to the mail box again.

And it’s not too late to get started. You’d only be two letters behind if you started today.

I’m really looking forward to this. It’s the first of three projects I have planned this year. (You’ll hear about the other two eventually, I promise.) I can’t wait to get my first Lettermo mail!