Letter #2: Ft. Myers FL, April 16, 1945

Tate begins every letter with "Dearest Lynn." The absence of a possessive pronoun suggests not that she is only his dearest, but dearest of all.

This letter opens with unabashed joy: "Hello Darling, I am sitting on top of the world, I got a letter from the girl I love tonight and it sure was wonderful." He continues on to talk about how he read the letter hundreds of times, that he even brought it to the mess hall, that he was worried he might wear it out.

It is such a simple thing, a letter. A piece of paper, a pen, a few thoughts, pennies to send. And it brought him such joy.

I think about the days before email when my best friend moved from New Hampshire across the country to Colorado. We wrote letters. I remember getting a little bubble of excitement when a letter would come, something specially addressed to me. You could always tell it was a letter from Theresa from her characteristic funky handwriting, script she still writes with today. Sometimes the letters would be on notebook paper, sometimes a postcard. One time she even sent a handmade card she had made with paper and fabric. Another friend who moved to California kept up communication through snail mail - again, it was always a suprise to find what she wrote on as well as what she wrote about. There is a delight in physically opening a letter that cannot be decribed. It is exciting to received emails - and I still do get a little buzz of excitment when I see emails in my inbox or a comment on my MySpace. But there really is nothing like a handwritten letter. It is permanent, tangible. As tangible as thoughts and feelings and emotions can ever really be.

It occurs to me that I don't have my grandmother's letters to my grandfather. I will never know exactly what she wrote to him, how she conveyed her love to him, the words she used, what her handwriting looked like. I wonder what happened to them - did he lose them, misplace them, were they destroyed?

So, maybe the tangible isn't always as permanent as we would like to think. Maybe her words are out there still or maybe they have always been with him, a part of his heart. Maybe just the act of writing down your feelings is enough to make the feeling real forever, even if it disintegrates, burns or vanishes into cybersace.