As a child, I wasn’t allowed to open a gift unless I had promised my parents that a thank-you note would follow. My mother used to sit near the Christmas tree with a yellow legal note pad on her lap and a pencil in hand. Before beginning the family rip-a-thon, I’d have to tell her whose gift I was about to open. She’d later present each of us with our list of people to thank for the gifts once their wrapping paper was crumpled into balls and crackling in the fireplace.

Only attractive stationary and felt-tip pens inspired me to write. Sheets of paper bordered with tulips or the Muppets satisfied my initial cravings. Gradually, I upgraded to the boxes of engraved monogrammed note cards my mother gave me for my birthday. One year, my brother even printed a block of paper and matching envelopes with my name embossed in hunter green as the final project of a lithograph class he took in high school. But I reserved the monogrammed stationary for relatives and friends’ parents, and sent weathered sheets of paper with contrasting, colorful envelopes sealed with stickers to friends. The tomes I mailed to pen pals from camp or cousins who lived faraway always required additional postage.

When I was young, my letters chronicled my daily activities, my crushes on boys, and school. As I grow older, I find that I only sit down to write a letter if I want to thank someone for something. I’ll make the letter newsy when writing to my two living grandmothers, and the 96-year-old babysitter of my childhood, as they are the only people I know who do not have email.

I fell in love with stationary, pens and, perhaps even, my own handwriting as my thank-you list grew over the years. I have always salivated in stationary stores and can never leave buying just one pen. I often write more than a simple thanks, offering life updates that, people tell me, render my notes more of a letter than a thank-you note. My parents nicknamed me Horace Walpole as a child, giving me hope that perhaps my correspondence might one day be published in tomes posthumously, as his was. But I never liked the idea that my writing might be discovered only after I died. Perhaps that’s how I fell into journalism, egotistically wanting to see my name in print during my own lifetime.

In college, I volunteered once a week at a nursing home. There, I befriended Thelma, a Mid-western firecracker who had been living in a pea-green room that smelled of Clorox for a couple of years since her early eighties. Whenever my sneakers suctioned their way down the linoleum floors of the nursing home’s hallway, I could hear her rocking chair squeak as she tipped forward to see if I was at the doorway. Her yellowed teeth burst through crookedly applied pink lipstick into a smile. I always leaned down to kiss her hello and to grasp her hands as smooth as satin sachets. She told me how nice it felt to be touched by someone, as she had few relatives who lived nearby that visited and her husband Carl had died years before. He used to kiss her every finger when she woke up in the morning to show her how much he loved her.

I would usually sit with her for an hour, and we’d tell each other stories. I stuck to my weekly visits even though there were days when I thought I wouldn’t be able to make it in between classes, homework, and a seemingly hectic college schedule. Driving there, I would race across Ohio wheat fields, my mind wrapped up in a paper I was writing for an English class, and the speedometer always tickling the speed limit. Driving back to campus afterwards, I always felt Thelma riding shotgun with me. We’d drive with the windows down as if it was a Sunday afternoon and I’d left my watch at home. I’d photograph the blowing fields with my eyes, and think of how Truman Capote’s “the willowing of whispering wheat in the wind” was my favorite line of “In Cold Blood.” A visit to Thelma always made me go easy on the accelerator even though she never told me to slow down.

The day I had to say goodbye to her I knew I’d never see her again. She was old and going nowhere; I was young and moving to New York to go somewhere. I didn’t know when I’d next be in Ohio. But I wrote her a few letters after graduation, filling her in on life in New York, a place she had never been. She always replied, with her curly handwriting veering diagonally across the page, as if she had written the letter while driving on a bumpy road.

A year later, I received a letter from her niece, Iris, whom I’d always heard about but never met. Her handwriting swooped across a Hallmark card with “Os” shaped like hula-hoops and “Ps” like plump penguins. She wrote that Thelma had joined Carl. I instantly saw her every finger being kissed. She wrote that Thelma probably wouldn’t have lived as long as she did if it weren’t for me. It was too huge a responsibility for me to accept but made me cry just the same. I think about that letter often, as it was one of thanks, the kind that no one writes anymore.

When I got engaged, my mother gave me an upscale version of a yellow legal notepad in a white leather-bound log with my wedding date engraved on its cover. Inside, gilded-edge pages beckoned to have the gifts I received for our wedding recorded on them. The book’s glossy pages complete with golden lines threatened me not to make a spelling mistake or, heaven forbid, forget to thank someone. I spent months writing notes to the generous bunch that showered us with gifts. Some who received my letters even called to thank me for thanking them, chattering on about the rarity of receiving a hand-written letter in the mail these days.

I’ve always preferred letters to postcards as their being sealed in an envelope contributes to their clouded secrecy and romanticism. While anyone can read my scribblings on a postcard as it sails across continents, a letter opened before reaching its destination always strikes me as an egregious invasion of privacy. When I see a letter in my mailbox, I won’t open it until I know I have a quiet moment to devour it, wanting to taste its every word as if it were a hot chocolate-chip cookie fresh out of the oven.

Right before I married, our priest suggested that my husband and I each write a letter of thanks to our parents. I rambled on for pages – not realizing how much I owed them until I started writing it all down. Both of my parents responded to my letter with one of their own, and, I sensed a shift in their voice. They spoke to me as friends, not parents, offering advice to a newlywed, to a wife, to a hopeful parent, with tips and cautions on how they have maintained their own thirty-six years of marriage. It was as if the distance of recording something on paper enabled them to let their guard down, and share things they might not have had the strength to say in person.

Although I belong to the generation of technology that is killing the tradition of letter writing with emails, text messages and phone calls, I still love writing letters as much as I love receiving them. Yet over the past year, I can count the number of letters I have received on two hands.

In some ways, I have become my mother when it comes to writing thank you notes. I expect them. I’ll always appreciate an email, text message or phone call, but the most cherished thanks for me is a letter, which can’t be erased and, once dropped into a mail slot, can’t be blocked. It’s the rarity of receiving a thank-you note these days that makes a letter a coveted delicacy. When I see someone’s handwriting, I am reminded of a wrinkled face, a set of callused hands, or a whiff of a perfume. I like to think about that person taking the time to pick out the stationary, the pen, and the half-hour in the day to write to me.

I keep my most treasured letters in an accordion file covered in Florentine paper. Whenever I open it to file away newcomers, I see the handwriting then hear the voices of my husband, Thelma, Iris, my late grandfathers, my brother, my parents, and the others in my life sorted alphabetically but loved collectively. I’m not very sentimental about emails. Deleting them from my inbox has become a reflex. But if I were to ever find myself in a fire at home, I would grab my accordion file and run.