Distance offered safety
Communication was a precious gift
words in letters to save, tied up in ribbon,
opened and savoured.
Today how do they preserve memories?
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Shawn L. Bird 
The cloud?
The cloud is so insecure.
And really, it means nothing. Paper, pen, pencil, ink, ribbon…tactile and sensuous. Real, not virtual.
I’ve thought of this often. Where will our love letters come from? You can’t tie a text up in red ribbons.
unless you print them off…
But does anyone print them off these days?
Reblogged this on By the Mighty Mumford and commented:
BY BEING TNAGIBLE PROOF OF WHAT WAS?????
A very good food for thought poem.
Thank you. I’m glad you enjoyed it.
On Flickr and Pinterest, I would guess. 🙂
But how long will they be around?
Great piece. Thanks for sharing.
My pleasure. Thanks for stopping by.
You are very graciously welcome. P.S. Nice profile pic.
Thanks. Great local photographer, Ava Franklin, did my author photos a couple of years ago.
Cool.
There was nothing like a handwritten note. It took time to receive it, so it was treasured all the more.
I still send them now and then, though certainly not as many as I used to. I feel the same thing about Christmas cards.
It takes me so long to reply to letters from my friend in Ireland but it’s so worth it- so much fun to receive real mail. I used to have several pen pals in my late primary/ early highschool years and it used to be so much fun running out to the letter box and finding one or more replies, my suburb sometimes wrongly spelt yet the letters still arrived. We used to swap notepaper too. I still have a huge collection of the special papers saved. Email was so exciting when it first became available in my house (I was in my late teens) and I can see how everything became “instant”. Yet those character and heart-filled notes were so precious- nothing will replace them. I haven’t officially stopped writing Christmas cards but the past couple of years I busied myself so much that I didn’t do more than a handful, and postage is 60c a card, so it can be pricey to send a lot of cards, even within Australia. I used to send small gifts to friends overseas and interstate, but it has become almost the same cost of but the gift (or more!)to post them.
Yes. It cost me $2.50 per overseas Christmas card (20+)this year, and 85c for the local ones. I sent over 60 cards (which I’d had made at a printers) so it wasn’t a cheap venture, but it is so lovely to receive ‘real mail’ these days: I think of the cards themselves as small gifts of care and thought across the miles
I did the penpal route, too. In fact, I had a Girl Guides International Post Box penpal from Finland when I was 12. She and I STILL exchange letters, and we’ve met twice over the years. It’s funny because we both married men named Bird! 🙂
PS. Merryn is a lovely name! Is it typical in Australia?
It sure is lovely to get real mail. That’s a nice idea- making the card the gift. I might try making photo cards next Christmas- I always appreciate the one I get from Mum’s cousin with her two kids on the front. It always has a newsy Christmas letter inside too. That’s amazing to have such a longstanding penpal which started in Girl Guides! It must have been so exciting to finally meet each other. That is bizarre that you ended up with the same surname! You are like sisters now :). One of my friends who lives in my street has the surname Bird as well! My Mum heard the name and liked it. Up until I was at university, I had never heard of other Merryns with the same spelling (I had heard of about 3 or 4 spelt Merrin). The most bizarre thing happened when I was in 3rd year BSc though- I found out that there was another Merryn Wilson (Wilson was my maiden name) in 1st year science at The University of Melbourne. It’s still considered an unusual name here- not very common.
Reblogged this on Vagrant Poetry.