Grandma wrote as she breathed: constantly. Receiving two letters from her in one day wasn’t unusual. Sometimes she’d forget to mail one, then reopen it later to add more. At times, it seemed she sent us letters before she wrote them.

The modern digital age has undoubtedly led to the demise of handwritten letters. But the real beginning of the postal service’s decline may have been the day Grandma died and stopped buying stamps.

On the surface, Grandma’s letters were ordinary. Her handwriting wasn’t elegant. Her scribbled words leaned right, as if they were trying to escape the page before she changed her mind. She wrote in pen on white paper and used white envelopes, showing her thrifty nature with cost-effective writing supplies.

Her approach to composition was substantial and sprawling. Blank space was a personal insult. Grandma got her money’s worth from every page.

Punctuation and paragraphs were optional, bringing a layer of translation to her often topic-hopping narratives.

Most letters to us began with the same “Hello, Iowa!” salutation, as if we were the only family in the state. She kept everything she needed to create a letter in a small three-drawer table next to her chair. She’d occasionally grab her well-worn dictionary and thumb through it to check a spelling or definition. Rereading her letters makes me think Grandma ought to spend a little more time with that dictionary.

Grandma’s free-range approach to language and storytelling produced inspired absurdity. Mixed metaphors, non-sequiturs, and unintentional double entendres were pushovers in her hands. By the time Grandma started a letter, grammar had usually packed its bags and gone home.

The moment one of her letters showed up, everything stopped. “Hey, we have another crazy letter from Grandma.” Mom or Dad would read her letters aloud. In Grandma’s world, no topic escaped her commentary, and she delighted in including every stomach-churning detail.

As children, we didn’t analyze Grandma or her letters. We experienced them. Grandma was simply Grandma, and her letters were simply letters from Grandma.

One of history’s earliest famous letter writers was the Persian queen Atossa, who wrote around 500 B.C. about matters of diplomacy and power. A few billion letters later, Grandma was writing to a misbehaving relative to “stop that acting up, or I’m gonna jerk a knot in your tail.” Queen Atossa may have written about matters of state, but Grandma practiced her own style of diplomacy: tough love, practical jokes, and dirty card play.

In their own ways, both ruled empires.