Thanks to e-mail and Instant Messenger, the old-fashioned art of letter writing seems to be on its way to extinction. And that makes me sad. E-mail is a wonderful thing. When you need to spread news fast, it is efficient and cost-effective. And when you want to be impersonal, it delivers better than any traditional "Dear John" letter.

But its strengths are also its weaknesses.

What about the anticipation of knowing a letter from someone special is on the way, listening for the sound of the mail truck stopping outside, the soft thud of letters dropping through the slot? What about the excitement of rushing home at lunch to see if it's there, buried under the phone bill, the Hannaford flier, the credit card offer; the thrill when you rip open the envelope, unfold the paper, and read, read, read until the end?

Handwritten letters have personality. I don't care how many punctuation-mark smiley faces you invent — an e-mail will never be as personal as a letter. There are the doodles in the margins, the feel of the paper, the design on the stationery, the "eureka" moment of puzzling out the one indecipherable word that gives a sentence meaning. Most of all, there's the knowledge that that letter has traveled. It is a tangible thing, with a birth and a history. You wonder how many hands it has passed through, what places it has seen.

A hard copy of an e-mail message just doesn't feel like something to save.

I am sad because somehow, when I wasn't looking, I became one of those people who has plenty of time to check e-mail — but can't find 20 minutes to sit down and write a letter.

For at least a month now, "Write Liz" has been on my list of things to do. I used to be a great letter-writer. A few years ago, when my sister Liz was serving in Mali, West Africa, as a Peace Corps volunteer, I was one of her most prolific correspondents. I got to experience her adventures vicariously through her writings — and the letters brought us closer, allowing us to share things we would not have said out loud.

Now, she is in the Peace Corps again, this time in the Galapagos Islands, this time with her husband. She has fairly regular access to e-mail, and I've taken advantage of that. But I'm ashamed to say I've only written two or three real letters since she arrived there last February.

Following my example, my daughter is already becoming a member of the post-letter-writing generation. She jumps at the chance to type an e-mail to her Aunt Katie in Cleveland, but I can't get her to sit down and draw a picture, with a few handwritten sentences, to send by snail mail.

I don't know exactly when the ease of e-mail turned letter writing into a chore. Thirteen years ago this fall, I was a college student on foreign exchange, living with a family in Madrid, Spain, who spoke no English. There was no e-mail then, and phone calls were extremely expensive. Letters were my lifeline.

I met the man who would become my husband in summer 1990, just a few weeks before I was to leave for Spain. We promised to keep in touch, but neither of us could predict how things would turn out. I wrote to him about my adventures across the ocean; he wrote back and told me what was new in Oneonta. The anticipation of waiting for the letters made for a sort of old-fashioned courtship — a flurry of valentines in red-and-blue-striped envelopes, through which we got to know each other better than we would have had I simply returned to college in Boston and visited on school breaks. We were married three years later.

Thinking back on that experience has made me realize that my love of the (hand)written word is something I don't want to lose. I think I've got enough time to change. After all, Liz will be in Ecuador for another year.

Lisa Miller is a freelance writer who lives in Oneonta. She can be reached at lisamiller44@hotmail.com.