Keeping up with distant friends used to mean making the time to sit down and put physical pen to physical paper and then find an envelope and a stamp and a public post box. Sure, you could call on the phone sometimes; it wasn't, maybe, outrageously expensive to talk for 15 minutes, but you sure couldn't talk for hours and you sure couldn't call every day, because who's made of money?

Sometimes I think we forget how much has changed. And of course young people have no personal memory of how costly communication used to be, either in effort or money.