The richness of waiting

I've been thinking about letters today and how much I miss them. Being phone-phobic the way I am, I love the alternative that e-mail gives me, but I miss the ink and stamp, the flutter of surprise at seeing my name hand-written on an envelope when I lift the lid of my mailbox. "The richness of writing and the deeper richness of waiting," Stanley Plumley writes in an essay about literary letter writers in the most recent Poetry Northwest.

That waiting always felt a bit like flirting to me, the tease of it. Today? Will it be today? And then the pay-off which sometimes disappointed in its banality and sometimes thrilled with its secrets.

It makes me sad, not only in my own life, but in general, that this form of communication has disappeared. Whether or not the recipient tossed the letter or hoarded it, there was a level of implied permanence to the process that inspired thoughtfulness. But now we've traded intimacy for speed. We've thrown away our private thoughts and instead spill them recklessly across these windows that everyone can see.