An old, old, old, old, old (key word is old here), old flame of mine from my freshman year of high school recently sent me this poem:

Like the first night of winter’s magical start

You have delicately alighted upon my weary life.

A few gentle, courteous flakes

Lingering momentarily…then

Melting under their own loving warmth,

Leaving a visual aftertaste…

Blissful remembrances

Of a passion-once forgotten-

Which might now only return as

Cotton quilted snowflakes

But will always threaten,

With frosted breath,

An Impending blizzard.

-The Finnish –

It was actually a poem I had written for her back in the days of two-week letter deliveries, and it almost wasn’t postmarked as the price of stamps had just jumped from eight cents to a dime.

“A dime!” I exclaimed. “Was she worth a dime?!”

Ahhhhh…Her love was worth any price so I tucked the letter secretly into my library book, whose return demanded a hike past the post office, discreetly under the noses of my adolescent classmates and friends and history was made and the parchment returned these many years later.

She also sent the original letter that so eloquently announced the poem’s creator, the weariness I felt from being so many “blue canoe” miles and island hops away, and the pronouncement that our Vikings would kick her Wolves heartily on the hardwood courts at tournament time.

I remember the agonizing wait from the time my hand cramped in the last paragraph I had written to the arrival of her response, how nearly four weeks of wondering if she smiled or teared or laughed or whatever, had me running the emotional gauntlet.

Those were special communication times. We now think that the internet and email and Facebook and texting have brought us closer. Yet, is it so? While our horizons have expanded with ease, our emotional detachment has also grown.

Gone are those days of snaking the phone cord of the one family phone through the kitchen, around the sleeping dog, past the bothersome sibling, over the reclining father figure, dodging the flour-rolling-pin of complaints from the phone-bill paying mother, and after finally arriving 20 yards away in your little enclosure of personal space…the rapid beep beep beep of the busy signal, a sound matching your heart’s anticipation as you redial again and again until the cord is tugged from your dying fingers, or a broomstick taps the ceiling from below.

There was passion in those moments. Sincere passion that was pondered when day after day the walk to the post office three miles away produced an empty glimpse back into the confines of mail heaven.

“Perhaps the letter was back there,” one would ponder, bending down to peer through the tiny open mailbox door whose three-numbered glass face and round metal-lettered combination lock had been in your family since birth.

“Perhaps the letter is resting on that little pile, or in that bag, or…”

I remember getting a letter then and grousing about it coming so slow.

“Two weeks!” my father exclaimed. “It is amazing how fast letters come these days.”

My father had his heart broken once. I never knew until the day I sobbed tears of rejection from this same girl, who now sent my past love back to me.

“It hurts,” he said. “I loved a nurse in Seattle once.”

That was all he said.

I found out that he would wait three months for her letters, and she three for his. The steamships were few and far between to the fox-farming islands and new settlements of Alaska. When the ship docked that carried no letter, my father went to Seattle, arriving four months later. He and his nurse met, and talked, and he met her fiancé, and they were friends through the days of their lives.

A few years ago, a friend whose wedding I photographed atop a glacier 20 years ago sent his wife an email from a foreign country. The glacier long ago disappeared in a freak act of nature but the couple found other glaciers and other acts of nature and, evidently, by the cold white inbox message asking for a divorce, other people to love.

I feel cold when I type.

I can write the same message on my computer screen and feel nothing…but when I enclose a pencil or a pen in my fingers, and press down upon the shreds of processed trees, and erase, and scratch out, and smudge, and spill liquids, and stain, and otherwise leave particles of my whole life at the moment in sentence and paragraph and page…I am alive and human and feel like a freshman with awkward hair nervously walking in Southeast rain toward a building that may or may not let me open a tiny metal door, the act of which could reveal a poem.

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When my freshman crush from years ago sent me back my poem she also wrote, by hand, this message:

“After re-reading your lovely letters I felt they deserved a nice, handwritten reply. There seems to be something lost in email after reading those. I think that is why I always kept every letter. They seemed so personal. So much time and effort went into them, it always seemed a shame to throw them away.”

I couldn’t agree more.

– Happy Valentine’s Day! Glad Alla hjärtans dag! Sagu ixsixáni yágiyee! –

• Contact Klas Stolpe at klas.stolpe@juneauempire.com.