I have been sending cards to the troops for over a year now. Not ones that I've written to them, ones that I've made, left blank, included an envelope and sent over to Iraq, Qatar and Afghanistan so they can use them to write home to their spouses, families, etc. When my husband was overseas, he opened one of the boxes and it was emptied in 15 minutes!
The men & women serving our country do still write home. Nowadays, deployments are a little easier because of email, webcams and Skype, but most of our troops and their families still value the written word. I think this is because you can hold on to it, reread it, tuck it in your uniform or helmet, put it under your pillow, cry over it, keep it in your purse or backpack or tape it to the mirror in your bedroom.
Cards and letters are tangible things - something that your loved one wrote, something that they touched -- it was theirs and now its yours -- it connects us with our loved ones or friends or whoever wrote the letter.
Do you have any letters from a grandmother or other relative that has passed away? When you pull them out to read them, what do you notice? Her handwriting? The date? Does it remind you of whatever was going on when she wrote it? Does it bring a tear to your eye as you picture her sitting at her table or desk writing the letter to you? See? The written word lasts longer than an email! I have bits of paper with little notes written to me by husband and left on the counter when he went to work - they are just scraps, but they were written by him. I haven't kept all of them, but I've kept a lot of them. So whether your message is on a scrap, sheet of notebook paper or a handmade card, it is a souvenir, a snapshot in time, a memory.
Take the time today to send someone you love a message - something you want them to know, something you should or want to say to them, or just say hi. Give them a tangible piece of yourself.
I'd love to hear your comments!
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Thanks Sharon for taking the time to put this all down on ether(?) so we will all remember the importance of Paper! There is something that connects us in no other way when we have in our hand something that once was in anothers. Now that I'm a widow I cherich every scrap I come across written in my Husbands hand. Well maybe not the college notebooks with class notes but pretty much everything else. My Mom has a box passed to her from my Grandmother that contains an amazing assortment of letters some going all the way back to Revolutionary times that were passed down in her family. Not only is it amazing to see the roots of the family but holding a 230 year old document takes one's breath away. Shocking too to find I'm related to the Tory's and not the Freedom side of the equation! That note was scribbled in a root cellar with dripped wax from the small candle while the author was waiting to be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reminder of how precious written communications can be. After all that's a great deal of what SU is all about.
Hugs and blessings and thanks too for working so hard on behalf of our troops.