Mar 24, 2003
Letter From Home
When I was about seventeen, and at college on the west coast of Canada, I wrote letters home. Email wasn’t an option (I think there was one computer at the college for students’ use, but it was a glorified typewriter, really, with no connectivity – and besides, even if we’d managed to dial up, in 1991 there wasn’t really anything to connect to). So I wrote home to my mum and sister – long missives on ruled paper stolen from my class notes folder, continuing in pages ripped from diaries and the back of photos and brochures – little snippets of everyday life, bundled up periodically – rather than being written in one sitting (I wasn’t organised enough for that) – and then sent home.
Except we were 10km from the nearest post office, and I could never remember to get a stamp. So I just kept writing and writing and writing until I would eventually get around to sourcing one.
Meanwhile, seven thousand miles away, my mum would periodically get increasingly worried. She hadn’t heard from me in months. She hoped everything was ok. Then, sporadically, out of the blue, she’d receive a bundle of scribbled paper – a twenty nine page missive written over six weeks or so. That would keep her busy for a while, and then weeks would pass and the worry would start again.
I think the thing was that I was in the habit of writing to her regularly – it just wasn’t getting through, because it wasn’t being posted. But the very act of writing felt as if it should have been enough. By writing pretty much every day, I was keeping in contact, mentally – telling them both all about what I’d been doing, and how it felt. The rest – the delivery – was just a matter of logistics.
The problem wasn’t in the regularity of writing, but in how often it was posted. I needed to remember that once I’d written it, it wasn’t yet *out there* – that required an extra step, too. And *that* was the problem. So when she complained that I wasn’t writing regularly, I was able to say “I am – you’re just not receiving it regularly”
Is there a difference?
