I was prompted to write this post after reading a post by Dianne, where she talks about reading text messages from a 'Celtic knight', a former love in her life. They are on her phone and she is loathe to delete them.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in my life, my mother is spending time reading correspondence and diaries from my father. It is time travel, of sorts.
This is where 'real mail' has it hands down over text and even email.
Real mail has feel and texture. It has smells, native and introduced. It contains hairs, rose petals, newspaper clippings and all the smudges and corrections of a letter well considered.
I have some letters written by a character we knew is Scotland, a real character in all senses of the word, Jimmy Douglas. Typed on blue aerograms, they capture so much of Jimmy's character and I regularly enjoy pulling them out and re-reading them.
My mother tells me that, in going through my father's things, she has found every letter that I sent him.
Next time some mindless gastropod uses that belittling and thoughtless designation of 'snail mail' to refer to real mail, do what you should do to any gastropod: hit it with a brick.
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