With Valentine’s Day falling this week I’m sure there’ll be many love letters and cards written and sent.
When I think of love letters I always think of this one Pap wrote to Granny when they were still courting.
Writing letters isn’t as popular as it once was. Folks do still write each other, but today it’s more likely to be in email form or even sent as a message on a social media platform or via text.
handwrite noun Handwriting, style of penmanship.
1973 GSMNP-83:26. They was sixty words wrote, and they was two handwrites. 1995 Montgomery Coll. He had a good handwrite [= cursive writing] (Cardwell).
[OED handwrite n Scot, Irel and U.S. 1483-; cf SND hand of write (at hand 8 (18)); CUD; DARE chiefly South, South Midland]
Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English
Many years ago the girls learned a beautiful old ballad, “My Dearest Dear.” It’s an amazing song—beautiful and heart wrenching at the same time. If you’ve never heard the tune you can hear it at this link.
The lyrics are filled with lovely poignant lines. The last ones are among my favorites.
“And when you’re on some distant shore think of your absent friend And when the wind blows high and clear a light to me pray send And when the wind blows high and clear pray send your love to me That I might know by your handwrite how time has gone with thee.”
Such a moving image of yearning to receive a handwritten letter from a friend you’ve not seen in a good long time.
Even though we aren’t sending letters back in forth in the mail, I do love the way we communicate one with another through the comments. I know many of you enjoy that too.
A reader contacted me to say she enjoys it so much that she would love to be penpals with any other readers who are interested. If you’d like to have a Blind Pig & The Acorn penpal please email me at blindpigandtheacorn@gmail.com. I’ll compile a of list of folks who are interested and send out a group email so that you can share addresses.
Tipper
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My Mom was a prolific letter writer with gorgeous handwriting & beautiful thoughts sent to loved ones. She was also a great documentarian, saving years of wonderful memories telling a life well lived & loved in one box, starting from a 73 year old letter to her grandmother to letters written to & received from family & friends the year she passed.
The comments you receive tell wonderful stories of years gone by. They would make a wonderful book.
Loved Pap’s letter to Granny & their sweet love story !!! Thank you for sharing it !❤️
I use to have a pen pal in England back when I was in 5th or 6th grade. We wrote with lots of questions about where we lived. I sent a couple of pictures of me and my friends from school. She had asked me what my favorite class was in school and I wrote back gym, but in her return letter she must have thought gym was gum, because she wrote any person who would take a class on gum was not very bright. I wrote back explaining it wasn’t a class about gum, it was a class called gym that taught lots of different sports, exercises, and sometimes different dances like square dancing or the bunny hop. Needless to say she never responded. That was the first and last time I had a pen pal. I use to write my friends and family after either they moved out of state or I moved since long distance calls were expensive. Many a letter or cards were exchanged, until computers came along with the ability to send emails. Then cell phones with no long distance expense made calling happen again. Then texting took over email since it was faster and made it convenient to not have to call when others were not able to talk. Then everyone joined social medias so they could connect with everyone they know in one place. Sadly, we are more disconnected in society today than we have ever been before.
Miss Tipper and family, To y’all at Blind Pig and the Acorn and all the viewers I would wish y’all to have a very lovely Valentine’s Day. Here’s hoping you are with your loved one, or at the very least, family members or good friends. Flowers and greeting cards are terribly expensive to give to loved ones, but how sweet to send a sweet handwritten note or a letter, just for the memories and to have something to hold close to your heart at those moments your feeling sad, lonely or missing your loved one or those you care about. So enjoy all you can this coming Valentine’s Day. I hope God blesses y’all today, tomorrow and always. ♥️♥️♥️
My sister lived far away from me in Colorado for many many years. We were only a year apart in age and we did everything together. I missed her so much. This was long before cell phones, and when we had to pay extra for long distance phone calls that neither of us could afford. We stayed close by sending letters to each other every week. We used to be silly and write secret notes in shorthand at the end of our letters. We both took shorthand in high school and were very proficient at it, so it was a fun thing to do. Both of our daughters kept this tradition going by becoming pen pals when they both were old enough to write. It made them as close as sisters, and they still are today. Thankfully, my sister lives in a state much closer to me now..just a few hours away. We can call and text daily, but I still miss those handwritten letters I received and wrote every week. Thank you for bringing back that memory.
I remember my Daddy saying his father had beautiful penmanship. I used to do a lot of writing and still when I do I try to improve but seems like I do more typing now.
I watched Katie and Corie sing and my goodness they were young back then but still had beautiful voices. Then since it’s Old Timey Tuesdays, I watched Paul and Granny sing and they sounded great, plus Granny looked beautiful.
My girls keep a couple of pen pals, but it’s hard anymore to find kids who even want to write letters. I’ve often thought I wish I had some women to exchange letters with. Especially some older women who want to be friends and share their wisdom. Love this idea!
Ah me, how timely this post is. Just the other day I saw that the National Archives is searching for volunteers that can read cursive. Who (at least among us mature people ) would have thought that would ever be a thing? I think I posted this awhile back, but handwriting has personality. Why else could handwriting analysis be meaningful? (And what will happen to THAT now?) I have discovered (what should probably have been obvious) that my handwriting has changed several times through my life. Along about 12th grade I was still using the classics cursive capital letters in signing my name. (There is a story about that for another day maybe.) And there was a time that I wrote very small, but that changed also. And now I write much more freely. (I dare not think what that means!) I do a handwritten “study guide” I call it for adult SS each Sunday and wonder at myself again because the writing is so different. Have you all noticed that also?
I have a copy of a love letter my great grandfather’s love letter to his future wife during the Civil War 1862 from Savannah, Ga. It is beautiful cursive handwritten with phonetically spelling. A distant relative has the original.
One of my favorite feelings was opening the mailbox to find a letter from one of my aunties or cousins in CA, or New York, or even Scotland. The excitement of finding a letter with my name written on it was just wonderful. I grew up fairly isolated in the country and long distance phone calls were expensive so we wrote letters. My cousins and I wrote about boys we thought were cute, the latest records we bought, our favorite subjects in school, etc. It was a delight. I’ve made a habit of mailing little notes to my grandkids. They are close enough to visit anytime but they so enjoy seeing their names on an envelope (twins age 5 and 6 year old sissy). I remember going to the Hallmark store to buy pretty stationary and if I was writing to someone “special” I even bought perfumed stationary. I do appreciate the newer forms of communication—wouldn’t know about you without it—but sometimes I do long for those days that seemed slower and easier. Changing the subject for a second—have you ever made a sonker? My NC friend says you aren’t a North Carolinian if you haven’t made/eaten one.
Nancy-I’ve heard of sonkers and it seems like I made one once, but the word is not one I grew up with 🙂
Randy is right, people don’t write like they used to. I know myself it’s easier to FaceTime or text my son and his family, who live some distance away, than to write letters. My mother was a great letter writer, I have a few letters she wrote me from up to 40 years ago. I love going into my ‘memory box’ and read them. She’s been gone over 15 years and I still miss her very much. Unfortunately, kids haven’t learned cursive writing for quite some time. When I send my grandson’s Christmas cards my son has to read it to them, they are 14 and 12. I hope they bring it back into schools.
I had to send you that pen pal request email before I even read the comments! Whoever gave you this idea, thank you, thank you, thank you!
We are having a lot of snow today; 5-8 inches and some freezing rain is predicted here in southern Virginia. In a few days (15th) I will turn 76 years old. I find it hard to believe that, except when my arthritis acts up. We were taught to write well in school, but I wasn’t a good writer until high school. I always was in a hurry and if some of you remember, the teachers (second grade) gave you a light tan paper with lines running across and they would have us make circles like a tumble weed across the paper to teach us to keep within the lines when we started to write. I would hurriedly scribble these circles, and the teacher would make me slow down and do it again. Today, and I don’t know remember when it happened, I have good handwriting skills and almost never go below the line. My daughter is amazed by it. I can’t believe some schools don’t teach cursive writing today. My husband and I started dating in 1965, we were 16, he was almost 17. We went to high schools in small towns next to each other and we went to the same church, where we met. (We had prayed that the Lord would send us saved mates. We married at 19). We would write letters to each other whenever our families took vacations. I still have these letters that he wrote to me. His handwriting was, and still is, atrocious. I never have figured out what some of the words were on the letters, and he doesn’t either. When I worked as a nurse, most of the physicians I worked with also had bad handwriting. They would get angry if you called them up to ask what they had written. Today most orders are typed on the computer. As far as phones, my family got our first telephone in 1957, a big black thing with a rotary. We were on a party line and sometimes you had to wait for the line to clear. We had some gossipy women in our neighborhood who would yak on it for hours, even though they lived in the same neighborhood. My boyfriend, later my husband, and I would talk every day on the phone and of course while we were on it, someone would pick up the phone and sometimes make noises on or lift and slam down the phone. My boyfriend made a distasteful remark one day and the woman yelled back at him. It wasn’t too long after that that we both had private lines. Speaking of pen pals, our eighth-grade teacher gave us names of other girls in other countries to write to. My pen pal was in the London, England area. She wrote me once and, in her letter, mentioned going to see and hear a new group called the Beatles. That was in 1962-1963. I wrote her a couple of more times, but she never answered back. I wish I had kept that letter. Sorry, this is so long. Everyone keep warm and safe.
Tricia, I will be 71 on the 20th. Much of your comment is a mirror of my younger life, especially about meeting your husband. Understand it was my wife! Along with the paper, do you remember the large diameter pencils we used in the early grammar school grades? As for my signature, I have never been important enough to have one you couldn’t read!
Randy, yes I do remember those large diameter black pencils. Thanks for reminding me. Happy early birthday.
I don’t write letters but I do send cards to friends, shut-ins at church and I do write cursive!!!
Sad to say but texting has taken over communication!
Love notes and letters from the past are a treasure.
Good Morning! I am always buying stationary and cards to start writing letters to my loved ones. It seems I never do. I think this post will give me the spark to start writing again. Thanks, Tipper.
I wrote my Mother a check when I was about 50 years of age. She remarked that I still wrote and signed my name the same as I did when I first learned cursive. Like Randy, my arthritic hands have taken a toll on handwriting as well as many other things I used to do fairly well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v51davRH9rQ
Writing notes and letters is fast becoming a lost art. Compiling a pen pal list sounds like a great idea.
Concerning penmanship, I have heard some say I had a good hand write to be a man, I just say you didn’t have one of my English teachers. She wouldn’t except your homework if she had trouble reading it. Now my arthritis hands make it difficult to write even a check. That is also something else that is disappearing. I don’t think cursive writing is taught in school anymore.
My wife and I exchanged a lot of love notes or letters during the last 5 months we were dating before I graduated high school, after that, I would either call or go see her everyday until we married. Sure wish I could send her one now. Nowadays people don’t write or even call one another. I recently read something along these lines “when I was young , we didn’t have telephones and couldn’t talk to each other, now almost everyone has a cellphone and they still don’t talk-they either text or send emails!” It was about 1965 before people in my area began to have telephones and most were on 6 party lines.
I used to write letters often. Then the phones took all that over. Then in the past couple years a cousin of mine and I started writing each other. My penmanship greatly has improved and the joys of getting letters, instead of only bills and ads, in the mail came back. I now don’t always dread going to the mailbox again. We don’t call, we write.
I thank you for maybe this post will encourage someone else to write a letter. It’s something to have a hardcopy of memories in your hand. Not just a memory to remember, a written always correct memory to hold.
I’ve been sending letters in the mail for awhile. People seem to really enjoy getting letters in the mail, especially children and young people. Handwriting uses different parts of our brain than typing and, in my opinion, is just more heart felt by both sender and receiver. I hope it becomes a trend.
Hi Tipper..just joined your blog..love your vedios and learned a lot even making biscuits and gravies…my husband is also a hunter and would love to learn how to can venison..I also can a lot of veggies during the summer…love your girls and enjoy you all.I do cook a lot like you and grew up doing things the way you do.I live in Leland N.C near the coast…about 5miles from Wilmington.N.C.
Lou Ann-welcome to the blog! So glad you enjoy what we do 🙂 thank you!