We Saved Every Letter We Wrote To Each Other Over 60 Years. Here's What Happened When We Read Them Again.

On a scorching June day in 2020, in the middle of COVID-19 lockdown, I hauled a bankers box labeled “Megan’s Correspondence” down from the attic. For a week I isolated myself in my upstairs bedroom, where I gathered piles of frayed paper in my hands, replaced disintegrated rubber bands, and tossed out long-forgotten mail that no longer tugged at me. I organized most of the letters and notes into bundles that I placed in large manila envelopes, which I addressed and then delivered to my local post office.

It was my own version of “return to sender.” I thought the decades-old letters might be appreciated by the friends who had written them — a chance to reunite with the essence of their younger selves. I certainly had no need to hold on to them any longer. I did, however, preserve the flood of letters I’d received from one childhood friend, Steph.

Miraculously, both of us had saved our nearly 60 years’ worth of correspondence, which we began sending to each other when we were in junior high. The two of us hatched a plan to get together and celebrate our words written on a palpable variety of paper — plain, patterned, crisp, lined, unlined, logoed, folded in half, folded in thirds, folded in half and again in thirds. We could have tossed the past and considered it irrelevant, but we were motivated to turn all that stale-smelling paper into something meaningful.

On a Sunday morning last fall, we met at my house to put our years of correspondence into chronological order in preparation for a read-through. Eau de nostalgia saturated the room as we fondled the starchy paper. Before long, we were surrounded by uneven piles. It took us a full day to bundle the letters by era and place them in sequence in an accordion file, each