A Letter Is a Bargain, Even at 66 Cents

Handwritten letters, postcards and thank-you notes are in danger of extinction. But a precocious 10-year-old is on it. We met on a flight during the pandemic, when she was heading from her mother in one state to her father in another. At the time, she had just turned 8 and was traveling solo, carrying a knapsack filled with markers, pads and coloring books. In between industrious drawing, she introduced herself—Elizabeth, or Lizzie or Liz—and demonstrated her fitful progress from printed letters to cursive ones.

Correspondence reveals who we are, from the words we use to the stationery or card they are written on. It isn’t only the effort of putting pen to paper but also the various steps of composing sentences, finding a stamp, addressing an envelope, and sliding it into a mailbox. The ritual of moving from salutation to farewell focuses the mind more than fingers scrabbling over a keyboard. In turn, clicking on an icon doesn’t compare to tearing open an actual envelope.

Just ask Elizabeth. As we were landing, she asked if we could keep in touch not by email, FaceTime or Zoom but by letters. I checked with her mother—yes, in a text—and she replied: “Of course, it will be fun for her to get mail.”

Sending that mail is going to cost more. On July 9, a Forever stamp is expected to climb to 66 cents from 63 cents and postage for a domestic postcard to 51 cents from 48 cents. The U.S. Postal Service points to inflation for the proposed roughly 5.4% rise in first-class rates. The hikes are unlikely to spark an outcry, given the dwindling ranks of letter writers. The postal system’s first-class mail volumes rose steadily throughout the past century, from more than 15 billion pieces in 1926, the first year data are available, to more than 103 billion in 2001. Once everyone got online, things collapsed swiftly, falling to 77.5 billion in 2010 and 48.9 billion last year.

Technology is efficient, immediate and irresistible. Why bother with a letter when a text can do the job in seconds? This isn’t a campaign to revive the quill and inkwell and the good old days of waiting months for envelopes to lumber in on a packet steamer. There’s no winding back the clock to before the ceaseless call-and-response of email, instant messages and social media.

Yet in what seems like the Middle Ages of the late 20th century, receiving mail could be memorable, be it an ominously thin envelope from a college admissions office or a plump, ecru one carrying a wedding invitation or birth announcement. Air mail arrived in wispy denim-blue envelopes stamped “Par Avion,” sometimes framed in red and navy flashes. Postcards from far away were dappled with exotic stamps. Today, sending a postcard seems an ironic gesture, an arch nod to a bygone era, like having a ringtone that sounds like a 1970s telephone with a curly cord.

All isn’t lost. Although Elizabeth has moved on from coloring books, she is keeping up our correspondence. My pen pal now designs her own stationery and has mastered cursive writing.

Ms. Cronin is an associate editorial features editor at the Journal.