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Health & Fitness

An Antithesis of Aunts

One aunt cut corners when it came to stationery while another was profligate in her use of paper, but both were masters of the lost art of letter writing.

Letter-writing has become something of a lost art, but I fondly remember two aunts who were, in their individual ways, paragons of the craft. Not for them the abbreviated messages of today! Their letters arrived in thick envelopes that probably required extra postage. In addition, although both aunts were able writers, they had very different styles. 

"Aunt" Betty wasn't really a blood relative. She was a family friend whose husband had been a schoolmate of my father. These friends had experienced lean times in the Depression of the '30s and that may explain why Aunt Betty had unique "stationery" for her correspondence. She wrote on the blank side of calendar pages or the reverse side of a commercial flier and, if the margins were wide enough, she wrote around the printed matter. She wrote voluminously and could make the most ordinary activity sound entertaining--the daily collection of eggs in the hen house or trying to find her misplaced glasses. The sparkle of her sense of humor virtually jumped off the page.

Aunt Lily was a genuine relative, probably about the same age as Aunt Betty although I'm not sure they ever met. Aunt Lily's letters were distinctive too and, in one way, the antithesis of Aunt Betty's: she was profligate in her use of paper. Her handwriting was oversized and she managed to get only a few sentences on a page--for page after page after page. I wonder how many boxes of stationery or pads of writing paper she went through in the course of a year and how many other mailboxes welcomed her substantial envelopes. 

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The arrival of email somehow doesn't evoke the tangible delight of such "snail mail." I salute the plump postal package with its reminder that distance had been bridged by pages that were inserted in an envelope by human hands, processed by human beings, and delivered by persons that "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor dark of night" stayed from their appointed rounds.

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