There are lots of treed and grassy parks within walking distance of the street we live on, complete with playground equipment and sport rinks for children and others wanting to take advantage of these conveniently located assists to quality community living. We made the most of them when our granddaughter was young and we were her daycare providers until she was nine when her mother bought a rural property and our granddaughter began attending a commercial daycare centre out of school hours.

She is now twenty years old and in her third year at University of Toronto with a goal to becoming a lawyer. Living in Toronto while she studies and returning to her rural home at holidays and during the summer months.

When she first moved to their rural address though we continued to see them often, I thought it would be a good experience for our granddaughter to learn to express herself through letter-writing, so I launched a bit of an experiment. It didn't last very long. While our granddaughter was happy enough to receive letters, since I also included funny little incidents and jokes I'd discovered online in those letters to tickle her fancy, she wasn't all that keen on reciprocating, though she did.

Yesterday, while idly looking through a few things I came across one of her letters. The envelope, at least the back of it, was well worth retaining. I had taken to enclosing with my letters to her, a stamped, self-addressed envelope to make it easier for her to write back to us. And she had taken to embellishing the back of the envelope where she obviously sought to match my humour with her own.

And the letter itself demonstrated her growing confidence in writing cursive. The content was flippant and added nothing to our daily telephone conversations, but it was an experiment that I thought might be useful to her in becoming acquainted with an older, perhaps quaint method of communication beyond email and texting.