Lost Art of Letter Writing

As part of an initiative to get better at relaxing, I followed a whim to purchase a "pocket scavenger hunt" journal at my daughter's Buck a Book sale.  The first item: postage stamps.  

Well, I had plenty of those in a disorganized pile from what has turned out to be four years of correspondence with penpals in Virginia and Poland.  Added to the chaos was all the wonderful sister mail that has accumulated from being a part of the Wildflower henhouse on MaryJane's Farm.  Well.  Maybe this is a nudge toward getting my letter-writing station in order?  

Major enhancements: 

• Rogued out the envelopes for more compact storage (snipped the postage stamps and a "good" version of each sender's return address).  Envelopes were shredded for compost.  
• Grouped correspondence by sender.  Labeled with a post-it note with the return address stapled to it.  Substantial correspondence warranted a binder clip, otherwise a paperclip, or nestle greeting cards into each other as a make-shift folder.  Try to to arrange chronologically.  Remind self to date future outbound correspondence for easy organization.  
• Graduated the penpal folder and MJ Farm folder to accordion expansion-style folders to hold the excess
• Gathered pens, postage, envelopes, address stamper and miscellaneous stationery in a single drawer.  Decided to add checkbook as well because much of my correspondence has been bill pay.  
• Dust letter-writing station to make it more inviting.  Admire work and memorialize with a photo.  

Areas I am still noodling on: 

• Address book in theory and practice.  In a perfect world, I would capture everyone's birthdays, anniversaries, etc. along with a summary of our past correspondence and contact info in one single organized space.  Should it be a physical book?  Something saved digitally?  What fields should I capture?  I find the most frequent use cases for an address book are (1) sending postcards when far away from the letter writing station - so I print out a physical list of addresses to take with me and (2) replying to a received letter - so having their address on a post-it as I file when I received seems like the most streamlined workflow for now.  Sure, I will miss birthdays and not have a consolidated list for Christmas cards, but let's crawl before we run.  
• Thank you notes.  This stationery probably needs its own dedicated drawer, especially if I tackle the gratitude challenge in MaryJane's Farm.   
• Flourishes.  I noticed in leafing through old letters I love the flourish of a wax seal or a lacy paper punch.  Maybe a few of these could be justified "upgrades" to my station.  How cool would it be if my wax candles for ambiance doubled for sealing envelopes?