A handwritten note or letter to a friend is a special treat in a world that’s dominated by email.

As 2022 draws to a close, we are approaching the end of almost three years of a pandemic when we could not see friends and loved ones and personal communication, by necessity, took a back seat. The art of writing a letter, became, well…a lost art.

When was the last time you took pen in hand, looked at a piece of paper or stationery, and thought to yourself, “I will write a letter to a friend”? I still write letters. Yes, I am that old-fashioned in that respect. I love the feel of a pen in my hand, and I like to imagine the possibilities of a blank sheet of paper. I have written notes and letters by hand for decades, ever since my mother made me write my first thank-you note (by the way, another lost art) to my grandparents for my Christmas presents. Even when all I could do was spell my name in crayon.

I was grateful that I had a short name.

I have a friend, one of my best friends, whom I have known since we were 8 years old. Her name is Clare, and she was the first friend I met when my parents moved from Portland to Seattle. She had freckles and wild blond curly hair and a laugh that carried from one end of the classroom to the other. We have stayed friends through high school, college, marriages, divorces, jobs, moves, retirement, illness, and deaths of parents and pets. Friendship is a lot like marriage, in fact. In sickness and in health…’til death do us part and all of that.

We have written to each other at Christmas and on our birthdays. Clare recently told me that on, or near, her birthday, which is in January, her husband goes to the mailbox and comes in waving my birthday card/letter in his hand loudly proclaiming, “Here it is! Your annual birthday letter from Ann!”

She is quite thrilled by this annual postal event for a couple of reasons. One, that she gets a letter from me. And two, that it is handwritten. She says I have beautiful handwriting. Yes, we went to school when they still taught cursive handwriting. She exaggerates, of course, but she is also biased.

We do not write about earth-shaking things or world-changing events. We write about important things, like how her dog, Stella, graduated from a puppy car seat to a “big girl” car seat for a trip cross-country. Or, how after the COVID shutdown, her husband grew a beard, and she said she hardly recognized the hairy guy in bed next to her. And, the funny thing, she said, is that she still liked him. She is very funny.

Or, how we are getting old, with our failing eyes, our wrinkles, our sagging tummies, and gray hair. And what is more important, that we don’t care. We are happy with each gray hair and wrinkle because we know we have earned them all and then some.

Or what fun we had growing up when things seemed much easier and simpler than they are now when then the biggest worry we had was what to do on a hot summer day — go to the lake for the day, or when we were older and could drive, go to downtown Seattle for a day at the Seattle Center.

We also write about poignant things, too. How hard it was when my mom had cancer. And then when she died. Clare and my mom were close. Clare was like an extra daughter when we were growing up.

Or that her mom has been dealing with dementia for several years and may one day no longer know who Clare is or that she is her daughter.

Now, when we get together, which is infrequent, since we live in different states, it is as if we have not been apart. We pick up the threat of our friendship as if we had just seen each other the day before. We sit in her beautiful garden, if it’s summer, a glass of wine in hand and talk about all the people we knew in high school, and what they are doing now. And what they were like … back then. We catch up. We watch the sun set; the shadows deepening and talk long into the night. We’re sure there are many women with friendships that have endured longer than ours.

And we feel lucky. I will celebrate Write To A Friend Month by sending Clare this column, along with a letter …. handwritten, of course.

Even if it isn’t her birthday or Christmas.

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Ann Bloom lives in Enterprise and worked for the OSU Extension Service for 18 years as a nutrition educator before recently retiring. She studied journalism and education at Washington State University.