Sadly, I don’t take the time to sit and write letters to people much anymore. The advent of email has made the act of correspondence quick and easy. I still correspond with my sixth grade teacher. She’s the only one I seem to send handwritten letters to any more. We have tried the email thing, we have tried to connect on Facebook, but there is just something that doesn’t feel right about it. Kind of like getting used to calling her “Susan” and not “Mrs. T,” which she granted me permission to do upon my high school graduation 13 years ago. I still call her Mrs. T. And I still write her letters.

When I was a little girl, my dad traveled a lot. He would be gone most of the week, sometimes for a couple of weeks at a time. Back then, long distance calls were fairly expensive, so we didn’t talk to him on the phone, save for a quick conversation to let us know he was still alive. It was well before the days of email, so all we had was the good ol’ US Postal Service. He would send us postcards from wherever he may have been that week, with a note scrawled on the back about how he was enjoying wherever-it-was that he happened to be, something interesting that happened, and a reminder to obey our mother. I still have every single one of those cards in my box of special correspondence.

I’ve had to purge some of the letters from other people over the years, though. As a highly sentimental person, I found value in every letter that anyone took the time to write to me, even those goofy little notes that my best friend and I passed back and forth in junior high school. I tossed most of those letters not long after I stopped being friends with whoever had written them to me, although I do still have the letter that my high-school sweetheart broke up with me (for good) with. It’s tucked inside the graduation card he gave me.

My ex-husband and I had a tradition that I started the first time we spent the night apart: I wrote him a letter for every day that he was gone — some reminder of me and a way for me to tell him that I loved him – and tucked them into his suitcase for him to find. It turned into making a $20 expenditure on greeting cards (thanks to my obsession with them) for the departing half, which then grew into us exchanging a handful of cards every time we had to be apart. We kept up the tradition even into our divorce, when the cards began to express sorrow and pain, rather than, “I love you and I’ll miss you.” I had hundreds of these cards from the seven years we were together. I kept them in a half a dozen Victoria’s Secret boxes for years. One afternoon, as I was moving out of my townhouse, I found the boxes, shoved into the crawl space to be all but forgotten. I opened the box and started reading some of the letters, was momentarily saddened by the notes inside, and then promptly carried them all to the garbage without finishing. No need to keep that around.

Anyway. Back to the letterpress.

After reading Sarah Noel’s ode to letterpress business cards post last week, I decided that to accomplish #77, I’m going letterpress. I like my current business cards okay, the moo card with a photo on front and my info on the back, but I want a really impressive business card. Something totally unique. Sort of like my dad’s coworker, back when he worked for the sawmill, who had his cards printed on actual wood. If that’s not cool, I don’t know what is.

Now if only I can decide whether I want to go elegant or mod with the design…what do you think?