Letter Writing Again

I am writing letters these days, after an unintentional on-and-off hiatus last year.

While in Taiwan this past summer, all of a sudden I was sending mail again! We had collected some addresses for the kids, from their friends and people, and I had brought a few myself. I didn’t quite get around to everyone I’d meant to, despite all the time I was there, and all the stationery I was surrounded by.

But we sent mail home: postcards, little flat packages with bits of stationery and souvenirs, missives with threads of connection across the ocean. It was part of the adventure to hunt out the post offices and attempt to buy postage in Mandarin and have them weigh our heavier mail. Like most things in Taiwan, even postage was shockingly inexpensive. I had no return address on these letters and postcards, so they were just heading out into the world with a hopefully legible and functioning address and a wish.

And having returned home to a lovely welcoming stack of mail, I’m working my way through them, as well as through some letters long overdue. Caleb also received some fun mail, people having taken pity on the poor young lad who missed out on all the Marvel cards while being dragged about on a sweaty adventure and being forced to speak Chinese: several terrific humans mailed him some cards to flesh out his collection. And now even Naomi is building up a small but powerful collection of pen pals! It has turned out to be a delight, for me to show her how to use the stamps and different washi tapes and stickers and rubber stamps to use. Caleb, having sent mail out into the world for some years now, has never been quite as enthusiastic about the mushroom cats as I am.

I’m in a particularly lucky position of having a stationery shop: our customers are naturally stationery people, and often letter writing people, and we also have an address that’s publicly available so the odd customer or stationery nerd will write in to us.

I’ve stocked up my portfolio with a few letters to respond to, as well as some loose sheets of letter writing paper, a couple of envelopes, a booklet of stamps, some stickers. Actually this is one of my favourite quasi-mindless, late-night tasks, with an audiobook in my headphones, babies asleep, Tuna stalking Chicken, scrounging through my disorganized boxes of stationery to see what bits I could use up, stamping mushroom cats onto the corners of letter writing paper, collecting half-used sticker sheets and tucking them into this well-loved portfolio.  

It’s fun and it’s lovely to get a chance to use my stationery, but mostly these letters are an exchange between kindred spirits, humans apart becoming friends, a bit of thoughtfulness in the mail. One excellent result of being a wayward letter writer is that people tend to be genuinely surprised to hear from me. Do you remember me? Once upon a time, in some previous paleozoic era, we exchanged letters?

It is a delight to find a letter in the mail among the bills and construction notices, and to hold a physical sign of someone’s thoughts: of you, of life, of this exact moment in time that by the time it reaches you has already passed. There is nothing like it in this world of instant texts and emails and pings pings pongs pongs everything pinging and ponging in your brain. Or maybe just mine.

But of course, the mantra of letter writers around the world holds true: you have to send a letter to get a letter.