Saturday, February 7, 2009

Letters and Comments posted to Blogs ...

... have a lot in common. For me, anyway.

I have always, always, always loved to get mail. Especially letters and postcards. But magazines {that I have consciously subscribed to - NOT the ones they send w/o my permission} are a real treat, too.

A full mailbox = a happy mailbox, in my world. That's probably why Mark picked up the most huge mailbox he could find, one summer in Montana. He snuck it home with a sibling, asked one of my sisters-in-law to paint things on it, then when she hit an artistic snag, he had my daughter Cara complete the process.

Our mailbox {behemoth that it is} is now adorned with vines & leaves { a la Kimberly } and California Poppies and California Quail {our state flower & bird, respectively}. And the door of it says QUAIL OAKS, 'cause that is the name we have given our property. I love our mailbox!

In this world of e-mail and MySpace and Facebook and all-things-electronic-for-communicating, though, the number of real letters one receives ... has dwindled. It's a mere trickle.

Not like I ever had loads of pen-pals, but still ... you know ... there's just nothing like an old-fashioned LETTER in the mailbox.

While cleaning out cupboards, closets, drawers, boxes, and binders recently, I have come across letters received from friends all over the world, across the decades ...

One in particular that I just have to make a copy of to send back to the original author is a letter from my dear friend Patricia, who now lives in Virginia ... she had just met and started dating the man she is now married to, Gene. The glowing terms she used to describe him made him just come "alive" for me, right on the page. I hope she's every bit as happy with Gene today as she was way back then, in the beginning days of their relationship. {I am sure she is ... she works hard at everything she does, AND she's an amazing woman ... how could she NOT be happy, I say !!!}

Now that real letters have taken a downturn {like the economy!}, I rely on COMMENTS posted to my blogs for that reach-out-and-touch-someone feeling one gets when one knows somebody cared enough to take the time to ... say something in response to what I've written.

That's probably why I comment so frequently on the blogs of others ... I figure they like it just as much as I do.

You know the fun ones to get? Those from strangers! Yup. True story. It's wild, trying to figure out just how someone came to be taking a look at one of my blogspots.

But a comment from a loved one is ALWAYS, in all ways, welcome. Just as much. I promise.

"It gives me great pleasure to realize I have one more invisible friend at the other end of the post office. Nearly every week a new one turns up, and I feel like I am having a party, and the postman is a sort of Santa Claus every day, with letters from my new friends."
-- Vachel Lindsay to Alice Henderson, 1913

So be it a letter in the post, or a comment on my blog, I want you to know how very much I appreciate your comments ... in whatever form they take.

-- Davielle

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