Snail Mail = cool ‘n’ neat ‘n’ stuff

Mailboxes can be fraught little compartments, filled with advertisements using horrifying fonts & questionable design abilities, dreadful news, boring wastes of precious resources, impending doom & gloom, and unfortunate reminders of ill-advised excursions in consumerism & capitalism. SOMETIMES THOUGH…a mailbox is a dark holding cell for a tiny little envelope of hope; one that is most unlike the others it lays betwixt; one which is encouraging in its happiness, simple in its thoughtfulness, and a wholesome, tiny joy sent from afar. Snail Mail! I absolutely LOVE it! The sending AND the receiving. And when it finds me, I am filled to bursting with delighted, frenzied glee! Someone was thinking of you/me, and put pen to paper to prove it. Holding a handwritten note in your hands, and seeing the writing, sensing the paper in your fingers, absorbing the thoughts written before your eyes is a multi-layered, sensory experience that can be so overwhelmingly personal and intimate, in the purest, most wholesome of ways. Reading the thoughts of someone else, how they turn a phrase, their spelling mistakes (or the absence of them!), the way they swirl their printing, or rigidly block out their words, or scrawl their alphabet, or whatever is their personal, human font, in general…the entire experience of receiving mail is really one of life’s most beloved and special happenings. And I never take for granted the effort it can take for some people to actually DO IT, when our digital world makes analog messages so outdated and moot. It makes the actual getting and receiving of Snail Mail to be even MORE precious and joyful and remarkable. So I am very thankful for my Gifter, who wrote a charming card to me with her old~timey ink pen, and then she sealed it with a gorgeous, tactile wax seal — what unique nods to the past, and the history & art of letter writing!
And now I set my own pen to paper, and respond to the treasure of friendship I found in my mailbox.