Why I’m Writing Letters Again

Notes on parenting, community, and writing things down

I was poking around the local Scouting America shop while the woman at the cash wrap rang up the pins and badges I was collecting for my little Cub Scout pack. That’s when I noticed an old manual tucked onto a shelf—a guide for parents on how to run a Cub Scout pack. It looked almost primitive, unmistakably from the late 1970s or early ’80s. I added it to the pile of pins, badges, and uniform regalia, thinking it might spark a few fun ideas for the kids.

I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to pick up a manual for how to do something before the time of not only the internet, but AI, Amazon, door dash and all these things that are supposed to “make life easier.”

There was something about this manual that felt alive in my hands, quietly putting a lot of modern life into perspective. I wanted to spend time with it—not so much for the instructions themselves (though the birdhouses and advanced knots were charmingly nostalgic), but because something else was stirring. I had the sense it might show me an answer to a question still forming in my mind.

Before I go further, a little context helps. Last year, I wrote a book on homeschooling. It was something I needed to get out of my system—after years of parents asking how we homeschool, I wanted to finally put it all in one place. I documented what we were doing at the time and tried to identify the practices that had truly stuck.

Through that process, I realized something important: my kids weren’t spending enough time with other children. In our area, there weren’t many opportunities for homeschoolers to gather that didn’t feel heavily tied to specific religious frameworks. We had just moved to town—a small place my mom grew up in—and we were still finding our footing. I wanted a way to meet other families who valued the outdoors, community, and the quiet work of instilling virtues. Starting a Cub Scout pack felt like the most natural answer. So I started one.

This manual from the 1970s has lodged itself in my mind, and I want to explain why. As we come into 2026—nearly fifty years after it was written—I’ve found myself thinking more carefully about our human condition, and how it has shifted.

I flipped through this manual and saw diagrams of homemade trophies, large wooden boards with each child’s name burned into the wood that simultaneously tracked their progress through the cub scout program. There were elaborate ways to make and create experiences for children that were lovingly made not only with many hours of preparation, but with teams of adults working on them together.

As much as I would have loved for this manual to function as a true guide, the lifestyle it assumes no longer exists—at least not easily. The kind of neighborly connection and shared community labor it relies on feels unfamiliar to my generation. I’m aware that I’m unusually lucky in this regard. I recently bought my grandmother’s home, a house that has been in my family for over a hundred years. My name carries weight on my street. I’m trusted—sometimes even respected—before I’ve had a chance to earn it. I host street parties with homemade pies and show up in my neighbors’ garages with crockpot meals.

Now, it would be too much of a bummer to explain all of this and also believe it isn’t possible to have this level of involvement and true community in our lives any longer.

Still, I don’t believe this level of involvement is permanently out of reach. I think we’re standing in a narrow window—here at the beginning of 2026—where we get to choose how we move forward in our communities, in our daily lives, and especially in how we parent.

I titled this article “Why I’m Writing Letters Again” because I’ve finally seen enough disturbance in our communities where I think we can all take a breath together and agree on a lot of things that don’t work. There is a softening and a humbleness to a lot of us who are realizing we are in a bit over our heads. Many are likely overstimulated, directionless but hold firm they want better. I’ve found myself there a lot, especially the last five years.

In this narrow window of a moment, the beginning of 2026, a fork in the road is becoming more into focus. One path has absorbed AI, current events, and the pace of modern life, and responded by consciously choosing something more human: pro–human thinking, pro–human feeling, and pro–human making. This side of the path is consciously creating and reading on Substack, exploring documentaries, joining book clubs, learning to knit, researching and documenting their ancestry (as to NOT be an ancestor who was lazy with their record keeping, of course) and really trying to remember what it means to value community and neighborhoods.

The other path, very nearby of this divide is going with the AI and wifi flow. Plugged in, scrolling away, chatting with their paid AI subscription like it’s their mother, father and the best coworking friend they never had. Too involved to look away for too long, there is truly a sense of “being plugged in” and I think we can all relate to that, or at the least have a healthy fear of it.

Is there anything wrong with one path or another? Well, this is that moment to at least ask the question, isn’t it? The thing is - it’s not a divide, it’s more like a park where we all get to see each other from time to time doing our thing on the path we are on.

These are the kinds of questions meant for kitchen tables—talked through with partners and friends over a warm drink, or something stronger—as we decide how we want to move through the next fifty years.

Because the 2026-2076 timeline is going to be so farther stretched and different from 1976-2026 one. This is a moment to be thoughtful and considerate of what we deem “normal” socialization.

I think about my children someday reading my journals and the manuals I’ve written—simple attempts to record how to do something as ordinary as run a Cub Scout group. If they found those words impossible to follow because society had drifted too far from the world I was describing, that would make me deeply sad.

What feels worth writing down right now, before it disappears?