Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

I have three friends who write wonderful thank you notes, the pen-to-paper kind that come in the mail. The kind most of us dreaded writing as children because we didn’t know how to get past “Dear Aunt Jane, Thank you for the sweater. It is really nice. I like it a lot.”

These three friends make their thank you notes personal. It’s not just that they thank me for a specific gift or kindness or that they use colorful language that excludes “really nice” as a description. They have a flair with language and usually add something about our relationship that makes me feel as if my gift is only part of the equation; our friendship being the other part.

Beyond thank you notes, some of my good friends and I used to write copious letters back and forth, detailing our lives, our spouses’ accomplishments, our children’s progress, and our hopes for the future. We thought nothing of pouring our hearts out, word by word, onto stationary that had a purple pansy in the lower left corner or a monogram at the top. Today, handwritten notes of any kind are an endangered species.

At the same time, email options seem to have revived the art of personal writing in general. I now write a couple friends just as copious a letter as I did when postage was half what it is now. And, like the old-fashioned letter, we save our ramblings on our hard drives for periodic reminiscing. Regardless of the medium, it’s the personal that counts.