Our ancestors declared love and announced births and deaths in forms that took months to arrive.

Letter-writing cultivates empathy, patience, and risk-taking absent in instant messaging.

Handwritten letters are acts of faith, requiring courage and exposing writers to vulnerability.

We hardly ever say “mail” anymore.

That word implies archaic practices and products: stamps, pens, paper, and calling others “dear.”

Today we correspond faster than it takes to say “correspond,” typing in code to make it even faster.

Even email feels obsolete.

As a child, I waited, frenzied, for our daily mail. The very theory of mail obsessed me: It linked people miles apart. So did phones, but written words seemed more sacred, transforming blank paper into bulletins: This is a craft. Trusting strangers to carry and deliver these: This is an act of faith.

We were taught letter-writing in third grade, where each student was assigned a faraway business to which we must write, seeking responses. I wrote to a tractor manufacturer.

Starting letters, even to strangers, with “dear,” and signing off after “love” or “yours truly,” did not seem bizarre. Yet it turned each missive, semantically at least, into an act of love.

The fifth-century chronicler Hellanicus of Lesbos........

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