Today, amidst the form letters and junk mail and bills in my mailbox, I found a letter from a friend. Even as I walked up the driveway, opening the envelope in my eagerness, the excitement of getting a real letter stirred memories. I remembered making necklaces from dandelions, doing a jigsaw puzzle in front of the picture window in my parents’ house, ice skating on a blue-white winter afternoon, reading a paperback book in the bathtub. For just a moment, I retreated into a slower, more leisurely world in which words took days to travel the sixty miles from a friend’s house to mine.
