I miss the once popular art of letter writing. I used to keep up lengthy correspondences with many of my friends and relatives. These days, like most other people I know, I tend to only correspond with people via online writing such as e-mail, blogs, or one of the so-called community websites like MySpace or Tribe or Facebook. I don’t much like keeping in touch in this way, but it seems other people prefer it so I do it sometimes anyway. I have some relatives who are very bad at keeping touch with me, but if it entails online writer, like saying hello via Facebook, they are much better.
I guess in some ways I am what you could call a Luddite. I like technology of course, but I think television is a dangerous passive entertainment. I love watching movies but also think most people including myself spend way too much time doing such things these days. I really do miss the art of letter writing, and I am glad I kept copies of my previous correspondence from years ago. I always kept both sides, my letters plus those of the person I was writing with. They are very interesting to read. I also have copies of my online writing, such as my e-mail history from about the year 2000 on, but they are on Yahoo, and are mostly not printed out. I go in there occasionally and read some of the mails, and delete some, but they could get lost in the public world of yahoo at any time it seems to me.
Any type of saved writing such as letters are also vulnerable of course, to fire, water, and misplacement. Last year our property owner set fire to the barn where I live. I was saving a bunch of my journals in there, and poetry and some correspondence so of course I was shaken up by her mistake. She didn’t submerge the horses’ electric coil to keep their water from freezing in cold temperatures, all the way into the water container. It was open to the air, so it caught on fire, as did the plastic water tank. She had made us clean up the yard too so we had coiled up all the hoses and put them in the house. She saw this fire out the window thanks to where she was sitting in front of the TV. We had to use the other animals’ water to put the fire out, and we were able to, but it was pretty scary. I thought a lot about electricity after that, and about how vulnerable anything you try to keep really is, whether it is in the virtual world, or a hard copy in a storage area.
