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Some dates bring to mind a wide array of paper clutter.  April 15th causes the stomach to churn and the brain to boil with notions of 1040s and 1099s and W-2s and a flutter of receipts.  Christmas reminds us of greeting cards and sparkly wrapping paper and tissue paper and shipping lists and clipped recipes (and yes, more receipts) and a partridge in a pear tree.  (Don’t mock.  Paper comes from trees!) 

But St. Valentine’s Day?  Somehow, that paper for that day is just a bit different. While
these (totally adorable) EnchantedLearning.com printable dinosaur-themed, cards, pre-fab Snoopy notes and Hannah Montana video valentines may be tucked away long before the Easter eggs have arrived on the scene, real love letters hold a special place in our hearts and can’t ever really be considered clutter.

Contrary to what you might believe of someone trying to get you to let go of the clutter of the past to make room in your life for the future, Paper Doll has all the makings of a romantic.  My first love was an adoring Renaissance man (well, as much as an eleventh-grader can be) and wrote me daily love notes.  His precise, measured handwriting, and indeed, his serious writing style, belied his nature, but his manner of presentation left no doubt that he was a true romantic. 

Though he would become a scientist, the first boy to capture Paper Doll‘s heart was a musician, a violinist, and each carefully folded epistle was sealed in a small square

envelope, the kind made for protecting new violin strings, and each such envelope was hidden somewhere only I could find it.  We had secret “mailboxes” such that our letters were taped to the undersides of water fountains or hidden between the pages of our high school library’s dusty, ignored books of love poems. 

Every single one of those letters is saved for posterity in my childhood home, and though the romance is long gone, the memory of having been involved in such a correspondence is enough to make the Jane Austen fan in me swoon.

Nowadays, the rare handwritten proof of romance tends to be an occasional postcard or letter.  Somewhere in the 1990’s, email supplanted love letters.  From what I can garner watching young people (and goodness knows, when you start using expressions like “young people”, you’re surely not one of them), private email professions of love have been replaced by text messages.  (Ill-conceived public professions such as those described in the country song John Deere Green have been replaced by messages on Facebook walls.  Am I the only one who bemoans the loss of grand romantic gestures?)

Given that the art of writing love letters is quickly being forgotten, Paper Doll is not going to try to convince you to shred your valentines and old love letters.  Indeed, while they may be paper, the inherent historical value (even if the history is solely a personal one) of love letters supercedes any perception that they might be seen as clutter.  So, instead of thinking of these as instructions, perhaps consider them as a granting of various permissions:

• You don’t have to discard letters from your past. 

If your significant other is upset that you want to keep symbols of an old romance, it may help to explain that old love letters and valentines have less to say about the senders (and your attachments to them) than they do about you. 

As we age, the face in the mirror reflects how we’re seen by our bosses, our co-workers, our children, but old letters let us relive our glory days in a safe, nostalgic manner.  We get to remember how we looked and felt and were perceived when our lives were, if not simpler, perhaps less defined by our carpool-driving, sandwich-making skills.

• You don’t have to keep letters from your past.

It doesn’t say anything about how much (or little) you valued a romance to let go of the tangible proof that it happened.  Some people actually prefer the hazy memories of the way a letter was received or written to the actual misspellings and blotted ink stains–and that’s OK.  Sometimes, reality is a little too real and benefits from a few senior moments. 

Do you remember the Thornton Wilder play Our Town? In it, the newly-deceased Emily gets to revisit a day from her young life, seeing it all, but unable to change anything about it.  One character says:

Emily, herself, asks:

Sometimes living with the past, even when that past is beautiful, is almost too painful to bear.  Living with the misty watercolor memories, however, rather than the tangible elements, softens the edges, so we…and our memories…may endure.

• You don’t have to keep all of your letters.

Editing is allowed.  Some people feel the need to save every scrap of handwriting from their great loves…treating “We’re out of milk” and “I’ll be back after class” note as if they belonged in the National Archives.  It’s just not so.

A great advance of the digital age is that we see our photos right away and can quickly and easily delete the photos that fail to reflect us and others as we’d prefer.  With the old film cameras, even if we had the courage to toss out the bad-hair-day photos, we’d still have the strips of negatives. 

Digital cameras inspire us to be ruthless–perhaps occasionally too ruthless–and let us delete the imperfections.  With love letters, as with old photos, while it is possible to edit too much, the alternative might be clutter and overwhelm.  Paper Doll is here to tell you, mementos are like a salad bar.  Take what you want, and leave the rest behind.

• You don’t have to keep something just because you always have kept it.

Life is realistic–what we really did and said and desired and felt.  But life is also what we remember (even if faultily), and our hearts and minds transform tangible reality to create memorials to our younger selves. 

But not all of our memories are pleasant, and though the objectionable things in life serve a useful purpose, we’re not obligated to carry heartbreak around with us for eternity.  You can keep all the happy love letters and toss the ones that make you sad.  The breakup letters may teach us important lessons, but once the lessons are learned, we can cast off those old textbooks of life.

• You are allowed to have some secrets.

It’s OK to tuck your love letters away, safe from the elements and prying eyes.  But do be prepared for someone to find and read them.  (And if they are found by your children, prepare to be teased without mercy or eyed warily, depending on the prose and style of your writing.)  And make preparations for how the letters will be handled…someday…when you are gone, even if that means having a secret pact with your best friend to play 008 (License to Declutter) and rescue anything incriminating before word of your demise becomes widespread. 

Jane Austen’s sister, Cassandra, famously burned most of Jane’s letters, probably to preserve her privacy and reputation, entirely to the dismay of centuries of fans and historians.  If you want your correspondence destroyed once you’re gone, the best method is, ironically, to leave written instructions.

• If love letters matter enough to save them, how you save them matters. 

If you’re going to save your love letters, especially for posterity, don’t merely throw them in a Jimmy Choo box, but preserve them, depending on your personality, needs and tastes:

Practical Peeps–If you’re just as happy (if not more so) reading the text of a Kindle as turning the pages of a first edition, you probably focus more on substance than style, content over coziness. (You also might be a guy.) You might be happy scanning your love letters, saving them to your hard drive and backing them up to CDs or external hard drives along with your photos and other memorabilia. 

Middle-Ground Romantics–Most of us just want to make sure the letters that lift our hearts and make our spirits soar are around to be reread (by us, or to us) in our later years.  A few precautions are advised:

• Unfold the pages to remove shmutz, dust, the cookie crumbs, etc.  (Part of the warm, fuzzy experience of rereading old love letters comes from unfolding the wrinkled pages, so I won’t nag you to store the papers unfolded or separate from their envelopes.  The level of adherence to archival standards is up to you…)
• Remove the staples, paper clips and sticky notes to prevent rust, discoloration and ickiness.
• Consider acid-free, lignin-free archival storage supplies.  Some of the better-known suppliers are Light Impressions Direct, Archival Methods, and Archival.com.
• Store the letters in as moisture-free and temperature-stable an environment as possible.  The experts say 70 F or lower is best.

Archivists–If you are, or fancy yourself as, a figure of historical significance to future generations, you’ll have to go the extra mile to preserve your letters.  To read more about archiving letters for historical or long-term purposes, you might want to check out:

• Ancestry.com “Preserving Love Letters”
• WarLetters.com  “Preserving Your Wartime Letters”
• American Institute for Conservation of Historic & Artistic Works  “Caring For Your Treasures”

Finally, I have one question for all of you Paper Doll readers: