Love Letters Worth Keeping

My grandmother kept every letter my grandfather ever wrote her in a shoebox under the bed. After she passed, we found them tied in bundles with kitchen twine — fifty years of correspondence, from courtship through old age.

Reading those letters was like meeting two people I thought I already knew. His handwriting changed over the decades — bold and looping when he was young, slower and more deliberate near the end. But the tenderness never changed.

We live in an age of texts and emails, and I don't think that's entirely a loss. But there is something about a handwritten letter — the physical weight of it, the permanence — that a screen can never replicate.

This Valentine's Day, I encourage you to write a letter. Not a text. A letter. Tell someone what they mean to you in words that will outlast you. That is the most enduring gift you can give.