Our Story
When we cleaned out my grandmother's home, I saved the letters.
Not the furniture, not the china — the letters. Boxes of them. Long, typed, handwritten letters from her sons describing life in the 1960s — war, college, marriages, children, the delicious texture of daily life. I read every one. I savored every detail.
I was also given a collection of letters written by Mrs. Grace Twyman to her daughters Grace and Martha, who were attending Wellesley College in 1915. This was not a coincidence. In the 1990s I purchased the home where the Twyman family had lived — a house built in 1894 — and restored it into The Solomon House Bed & Breakfast. I walked those floors for years. I felt the presence of that family in every room. Scraps of their original wallpaper, the architecture of their sacred spaces, the mystery held in the walls — all of it spoke to me the way only old things can. When the letters were placed in my hands, I understood why. Some stories find you because you were always meant to carry them forward.
That is when I understood something I have never been able to forget: the decorations fade. The cake is eaten. The toasts are forgotten by morning. But a letter — a real letter, written by hand, with intention — becomes something else entirely. It becomes an heirloom.
I taught writing for more than twenty years. When my students wrote letters, something remarkable happened. They opened. They said the things they had never found a way to say out loud. Because a letter asks something of you — it asks for your time, your attention, your most honest words. And time, I have always believed, is the ultimate luxury.
Dear & Always was born from that belief.
We create keepsake letter boxes for life's most meaningful gatherings — weddings, showers, celebrations, the moments when the people you love are all in the same room and something true needs to be said. We give your guests the space, the tools, and the gentle invitation to write it down.
Because someday — years from now, in a quieter house — someone will open a box and find the words. And they will know, in the way that only a letter can tell you, that at a moment in time they were thought of, and loved, and worth the time it takes to say so.
Words create worlds. We want yours to be full of love and beauty.
— Shannon Howard, Founder & Letter Keeper