I must make a confession: until this evening, I hadn't left the house since Sunday evening. Oddly, I didn't mind being in the house most of the week. I hope I'm not becoming a hermit, because while I am more of a homebody than a party girl (I call myself a closet extrovert), I feel it's generally necessary health-wise to get out daily. Whatever.
Anyhow, when I went downstairs I was shocked that I hadn't received a single piece of mail. Not even junk mail, bills, catalogues, or solicitations for tzeddakah. For a moment I felt relief, since I basically have not enjoyed fetching the mail since my friends and I ceased to write letters back in the 90s; it's all stuff you can wait to see nowadays, if you know what I mean. But then I had to ponder whether this absence of stuff in my mailbox was indicative of something. Maybe I've been cloistered so long these last few months that even the mass mailers have taken note. "Don't bother sending her stuff. She just throws it in the trash- if and when she leaves the house!".
All I can say is that the experience left me with a nagging feeling. Let's face it: in this day and age, where everything is digital, nobody writes letters anymore, and to get anything in your mailbox that isn't a bill seems like a treat. Maybe it's a vestige of my generation, but I miss that tactile experience of collecting a fat envelope from my box and spending an hour reading a handwritten missive to keep me current with the writer's life-at-present. So when that box was empty this evening, it really hit me that those days are dead and buried.
I'm getting old. I suppose I'll just have to suck it up and adapt. :p
I LOVED receiving handwritten mail. I loved writing it too, just not as much as receiving it, LOL. and once the kids came, who has the time? Yeah, I miss those days. but not enough to sit down and write a long letter...
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