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My grandfather wrote in a hand so cramped and slanted that the first few letters I received from him, back when I was in my twenties and living in another city, took me the better part of an hour each to get through. I would sit with the letter at the kitchen table, sounding out individual words like a much younger reader, holding certain letters up to others on the page to compare shapes and guess at what he meant.
He wrote the way, I later learned, he had been taught in a one-room schoolhouse decades before I was born, a particular looping style that nobody teaches anymore, certain letters formed in ways that looked almost like a different alphabet at first glance. His lowercase e’s closed up tight, nearly invisible, and his capital letters at the start of sentences were so ornamented they sometimes took me longer to identify than entire words around them.
Learning a hand instead of reading a letter
By the fourth or fifth letter, something shifted. I was no longer decoding word by word. I had learned his hand the way you learn a person’s voice, not through any conscious study but just through repeated exposure, and suddenly the letters that used to take an hour took ten minutes, then five. I could tell his mood from the pressure of the pen before I had even read a sentence, letters pressed deep and dark when he was frustrated about something, lighter and looser when he was just passing along ordinary news about the garden or the weather.
I do not think I fully appreciated what I was learning until after he died and the letters stopped coming. I still have all of them, maybe thirty in total, kept in the same drawer, and now when I reread them I realize I am one of a very small number of people left who can actually read his handwriting without real effort. My cousin cannot make it out at all. She showed me a letter once, one he had sent her, and asked me to just tell her what it said out loud because she had given up trying to parse it herself.
Some handwriting stops being a barrier and starts being a language you happen to be fluent in, taught to you by one specific person.
What gets lost when a hand disappears
There is something quietly sad about being one of the last people who can read a particular handwriting easily. It means that whatever is written in that hand will, eventually, need a translator, someone sitting with it letter by letter the way I once did, unless it gets transcribed into something more universal first. I have thought about typing out all thirty letters, just to have a plain text version that anyone in the family could read without training. I have not done it. Part of me feels like the difficulty of reading his hand is itself part of what the letters are, that a typed transcript would flatten something important out of them.
My own handwriting, for what it is worth, has changed noticeably over the years, and I wonder sometimes if a version of me in twenty years will have to relearn how to read my own younger hand the way I learned my grandfather’s. I have old journals from my early twenties with handwriting that looks almost foreign to me now, rounder, more careful, before my hand loosened into whatever quicker, messier shape it has settled into as an adult.
Reading a letter versus reading a person
When I go through his letters now, on the rare occasions I take the drawer out and sit with them, I notice things I never picked up on the first time through, back when I was still working hard just to identify each word. There is a particular way he underlines a phrase when he means it seriously, a slight downward slope his lines take toward the end of a page as his hand tired out, a habit of crossing out a word cleanly rather than scribbling over it, leaving the original word still legible underneath whatever he changed his mind about.
None of that would have survived a typed version. It would just be words, correct and readable and completely missing the person who wrote them. I think that is the real reason I have kept the letters in the drawer instead of transcribing them onto something more permanent or more legible. The difficulty is not a flaw in the letters. It is the last remaining trace of exactly how his hand moved across a page, something no typeface will ever replicate, no matter how faithfully it copies the words themselves.
