Letters bring focus to the community

Christina Nuckols

Nuckols is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.

My friend Margaret Edds was just three years old when her mother died of rheumatic fever. She can barely remember Sara, but Margaret came to know the warm, witty woman who gave her life through 300 letters that had been lovingly preserved by her father and Aunt Eleanor.

When I read “Finding Sara,” Margaret’s book about that experience, I felt lucky that my mother is also a letter-writer. But I also was saddened to think how few daughters will have the opportunity to peer into their mothers’ lives through hand-written letters.

Letters have largely gone the way of eight-track tapes and horse-drawn buggies. Emails, tweets and Facebook posts from Mom may hang around on the Internet forever, but even if you can find them out there in the ether, they don’t carry the same sentimental value.

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