It started in December.

A “Christmas Card” friend asked for my new address. She was going to write it, in ink (because I am never leaving here) in her address book.

Her address book?…..I shared with her my excitement of having once inherited a desk in a cubicle that had a dusty Rolodex left behind. I told her how, in this age of technology, I coveted the handwritten names and back line numbers it contained. How it felt like a touchstone to a time when information was gathered and preserved like a secret to be kept, an honor to be won.

A few weeks later, after Christmas had come and gone, in the ebb left in the holiday wake, IT arrived.

A postcard.

A challenge.

An assignment.

“In the spirit of Rolodexes and Address Books……” it began.

It was an invitation to a simpler time.

An exchange of information.

A correspondence, in the most arcane form.

A 4×6 template in which to communicate the most vital of information. No room for preamble or placation. No room to cushion or pad or explain. Just the facts and the trust that the friend on the receiving end knows you well enough to extract the tone and underlying meaning.

And so it began.

I had myself a postcard pen pal.

(Not my first……there was that time in elementary school when we all wrote to children in other countries, and that time I joined a church for the sole purpose to writing to prisoners, but those are stories for another day…..)

The point of THIS story is……in this day and age when everything is so fleeting and tentative and can be erased with a simple “backspace” or “delete; ” when “mail” comes in the form of something intangible, words on a screen that can never be touched or held, when there is no handwriting, only font, there is something magical about going to the mailbox and finding something permanent.

Something beyond the ephemerial.

Something that can be hung on the refrigerator or tucked into a box.

Something that can be held and studied and turned over in your hand.

Something that connects you to the here and now.

And the most magical thing about these postcards?

They seemed to invite other mail.

Valentine cards and thank-you cards and “just because” cards began arriving one after the other.

So….this weeks “Thing I am Loving RIGHT Now” is going to the mailbox.

Sifting through the ads and the mailers and the “junk” in search of that tangible piece of connectivity.

A link to the outside world.

In this day and age, I am learning, it is easy to be “friends” but harder to be “real.”

This week, this moment, right now…..I am loving the feel of thick card stock in my hands.

The weight a stamp adds to it.

The weight of words on paper……