31 Days/Five Minute Friday: Mail
This week’s Prompt is: MAIL
Okay… had to laugh at this prompt. Of all of the one word prompts for Five Minute Friday, the one about mail… one of my life-long obsessions, is the one that trips me up and puts me behind in keeping up with the 31 Day Challenge.
(Fitting, isn’t it)
So… mail. Never heard of it. (wink) I’ve never, ever written a letter. Never, ever have gone to the post office and asked for weird denomination stamps because I have some older denomination stamps I really want to use up but I don’t want to go crazy over the current cost of an overseas letter.
($1.15, by the way.)
And for those who don’t know me… I’m completely kidding there. My dad had a saying about me when I was in high school – my penpalling postage was putting some postage worker’s kid through college. By this point, I’ve probably put three through. I’m over thirty years into letter writing now. THIRTY. I still write with someone I met in high school. One of my penpals since junior high no longer writes letters, but we’re connected via Facebook.
I honestly can’t imagine a life without happy mail coming into the postbox.
I’ll admit – I’m not the world’s best penpal. I tend to be very slow and probably get myself in over my head with the number of penpals I can actually handle, but there’s something about meeting people from far-flung areas of the world that I know I’ll never be able to visit in person. This is my way of visiting them.
Most of them are folks I have something in common with – a hobby, a collection, a fandom obsession, Pagan faith… something. But I have written to a variety of people over the years that I have nothing in common with at all. Those can be the more challenging letter exchanges, but also the most interesting because no matter what, you’re guaranteed to learn something completely new.
And when I’m not writing for fun, I’m writing letters for a purpose. Girls Love Mail for women who just discovered a cancer diagnosis, More Love Letters to give a stranger a random page of encouragement. Various soldier connection projects to send some good wishes to those overseas. You can’t get that from an email. You’ll only get that connection from touching a piece of paper that someone else selected, watching their movements etched with the ink of a pen, capturing their thoughts.
Write letters, folks. Send letters. Receive letters.
Help send a postal worker’s child to college. 🙂
(and for the record… here’s the current “I need to respond to” mail pile, taken right after finishing this entry) Photo lost in the Great Purge of 2022. 🙁
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This post is part of my annual participation in the Write 31 Days Challenge. This year I am joining a group of writers on a Five Minute Free Write journey throughout the month.
Those who’d like to participate in Five Minute Friday will write for five minutes on the topic of the week, post it on their own blog and link up the post here. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation.