There’s a letter now kept in Niantic penned by a local resident’s relative in California on a doomed aircraft, the last cursive remnant of a life.

The writer left her children behind, boarding a flight with her husband to celebrate their wedding anniversary in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

High above the ground, she wrote a letter by hand to her father until, mentioning the captain’s warning of anticipated turbulence, she signed off to secure her belongings.

Some time later, the aircraft slammed into a remote western mountainside, killing all 110 on board.

It was three months before the wreckage was located and the letter rescued, eventually finding its way to relatives in Niantic.

Her handwriting today transports the reader to that doomed aircraft. It places us in the seat next to the writer. We hear the captain’s announcement over the droning engines, and watch her carefully put the letter away, without a clue that her life will soon end.

Though committed to paper in the 1960s, her cursive imprint preserves the power and intimacy of that moment, bringing her to life decades later.

Such is the emotional draw of the handwritten word, and time has no impact on such cursive connections.

In today’s digitized, electronic world, nothing has replaced the power of a handwritten letter. No modern document provides such an intimate window to the soul.

My mother, now deceased, wrote letters to distant children and relatives by hand. Her meanderings provide an everlasting opportunity for reunion, her essence and humanity rising from the page to this day.

Personal script is more than just a catalyst for memory and imagination. It’s a mysterious, alluring attraction between writer and reader. It’s a bond conceived in our human DNA.

And it’s not about the content of the letter, the stature of the writer, or whether you even knew them. A bond is felt whether it’s an historical figure writing a wartime letter home, a famous writer providing fatherly advice to his daughter in college, or our own middle-class mother writing about mundane things in her daily life.

Even a handwritten recipe from the kitchen of a loved one brings them back.

All handwriting equally conveys the unique, soulful essence of every correspondent who picks up a pen, like an emotional fingerprint.

The keyboard has understandably killed cursive penmanship, which is unfortunate, since a typed letter is far less intimate than a penned one.

Type can certainly recall a voice and make you smile, but handwriting somehow injects you with the writer’s personality.

I have a relative in his eighties who is also a good friend. From six hundred miles away, he creates handwritten notes, often humorous, and puts them in the mail. He cajoles, compliments and critiques. His personality leaps off the page, and I’m with him again.

The connection wouldn’t be the same if he typed them.

If you’re the lucky recipient of handwritten letters, treasure them. Enjoy these windows to the soul, these powerful, cursive remnants of a life.

John Steward lives in Waterford. He can be reached at tossinglines@gmail.com. Read more at www.johnsteward.online.