Sometimes our notes were just a quick sign-off and an xo inside a Hallmark card. Other times, pages and pages of handwritten scrawl. In the season of moving to a new borough in NYC, I’ve been locating some of my most treasured letters and re-reading them for the first time in years. A few things have come back to me, about slowness, about time, about what it means to actually be known by someone.
One thing older generations did better than us: time
It's easy for time to speed up or slow down depending on the phase of life you’re in. But before the digital age, there was a real knack for leaning into it rather than outrunning it.
We’re more connected than ever, cell phones, social media, 24-hour news, and that connection often comes with a cost. Life starts to feel measured by Instagram posts or LinkedIn updates. We compare whether we’re too far behind our peers, or too far ahead, and we step out of the timeline of our own lives entirely. We carry the weight of presidential terms, pandemics, and environmental crises as a kind of personal timeline. It’s exhausting.
In the dozens and dozens of letters I received from Annie, none of those things were mentioned. Not once.
She talked about time through season. When the cottontail bunnies showed back up in the yard. The way the air feels on the first morning you recognize it has become fall. She experienced time passing through a lens of physicality she could connect to every time she looked out a window. What a grounding way to live.
We all need a witness
Annie never married and had no children. But community was never in short supply for her. She had many pen pals in addition to me, and for each one she’d craft stories about her work at the church, how she spent her days, what she was looking forward to. We all want a witness to our lives, someone who receives the small details and holds them. Through the art of the letter, Annie’s life was better documented and better remembered than most people’s ever are.
The letter preserves essence
Here’s the thing about re-reading her letters now that she’s gone: it’s not like reading old emails. I can feel her. Her laughter. Her cadence. The way she’d turn a phrase.
Life really is, in the most non-cliché way, a collection of little things. And Annie’s letters were proof. They were almost never about the big stuff, graduations, new babies, important doctor’s visits. They were about the life that happens in between. What she found at her church consignment shop she lovingly called “the Mouse House,” shopping with my cousin Alicia. How much she cherished the broach I mailed her after spotting it at a thrift and thinking immediately of her. Her asking for an update on how my cat’s vet visit went.
That’s it. That’s a life. And reading it back, it’s a full one.
There’s something about the act of writing a letter that slows the thoughts just enough to translate them to paper, but not so much that they get heavily edited or reconstructed. What comes out is real. It’s her.
Annie is remembered by her huge heart, her willingness to give time and love freely, her adoration of teddy bears, her deep connection to her beloved sister (a bond that I believe forged the path for the closeness I share with my own sister today), and her passion for writing letters.
I wish I could talk to her now, in my adult life. Tell her that while I don’t get cottontail bunnies in my front yard in NYC, my signs of spring come with picnic blankets in the park. That she is the reason I started Strawberry Afternoon, a postcard club so people all over the world can share their essence with their loved ones, just as she did across her 100 years.
She taught me that a letter is not just a letter. It’s proof that someone existed, fully and specifically, and that someone else was paying attention.
Until the Next Strawberry Afternoon,
Tori.