Sending an letter internationally costs $1.10.

Sending an envelope with any weight and heft will set you back at least a few bucks.

And now our current foreign exchange student is packing up and trying to find an economical way to send his stuff back home to Denmark. To say we’ve found no truly affordable options is an understatement. Taking extra bags on an airplane is not only expensive but it’s a logistical nightmare as well. If we can get everything out of this country for less than $200, it will be a miracle, and I think using the U.S. Postal Service is the only way that’s going to happen. Early price estimates from UPS and FedEx hovered around $500 or more.

I’ve lamented the cost of overseas postage in the past, but looking up prices just to get a box of items overseas has really pounded home the cost issue with snail mail. I understand there is a lot that goes into the cost of mailing any item—labor, transportation, handling, insurance—but it’s almost become prohibitive for people to send anything. We’re entering the territory where using snail mail is only for those who have disposable income. Given that digital communication is somewhat free—you can set up a free email account and access it at the library—it should come as no surprise that written communication is dying a slow death.

But some things—shoes, clothes, souvenirs—absolutely must be shipped, and in exploring our cost options for that, I’ve honestly been blown away at how expensive it is to send a box overseas. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. I tried to send a five-pound box to Slovakia over the holiday season and it was going to cost about $50.00. I ended up not sending it, took the contents home and just sent a card instead.

Costs for using the postal service seem to be on the rise, and I think it’s shutting the average person out. Sending snail mail shouldn’t be a special occasion, and yet I feel as though we’re reaching that point. Have we hit a place where our foreign exchange student really has to put a price on his life in the United States to determine whether something is worthy enough to send back to Denmark? That just makes me sad.

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It’s a bittersweet realization. Clearly I thought I was Superwoman given the backlogged life I’ve collected over the past several years, but it is time to let go of that false notion.

To help mourn the passing of my magazines out to the recycling bin, I’m actually taking a few minutes to flip through each one to cut out words and images that speak to me and may be worthy of a card collage or handmade envelope someday.

What I have now is a pile of cut up magazines and a stack of clippings that I fully acknowledge may never be used. In the crafting world, I think it’s a given that not everything is going to find a home, but even the simple act of looking through the magazines and trimming those things that speak to me in some way has had a bit of a therapeutic effect. Even if I never get the chance to glue them down in the right way or fold them up to be dropped in the mail, there’s something inherently creative about collecting fleeting pieces from the printed world that have a little extra spark of something more.

I used to be attracted to colors when I tore through magazines, but it seems like I’ve been gravitating toward a lot of words and phrases as of late. I’m finding words that describe me and the people with whom I surround myself. And I’ve found myself drawn toward pictures of colorful produce as well as abstract or vintage images.

And so it seems that, even though I am purging my life of some things, I’m collecting others. Somehow I find my great big pile of pretty scraps to be a lot less daunting and much less stressful than the pile of magazines from which they came. Even if I never use them for anything, I’ve found something beautiful and created something inspiring just with a few small scissor snips.

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Though I spend a lot of time in the social media sphere, I tend to be a bit of a skeptic. How can casual relationships consisting of status updates and “likes” truly result in a legitimate friendship? But when my seatmate mentioned that social media could be a way to get to know someone better, I began to question whether I actually give these sites the benefit of the doubt when it comes to appreciating their benefits. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram … what’s next? How many more of these social media sites can I tuck under my belt before I lose complete touch with reality?

Perhaps one of the most ironic parts of this whole conversation was the fact that I was on a plane heading out to meet a client who is also passionate about relationships, so I was inundated with layers of friendships and business and relationships in general for the better part of last week. It’s practically all I’ve thought about since then. Relationships are a complicated layer of life in our growing digital world, and I wonder if it makes us appreciate the possible difficulty and sincerity often required in creating and sustaining a meaningful relationship.

My seatmate was headed to Hawaii. He bought a one-way ticket to visit his family on Maui and finish writing his next book. That is his priority this summer. But as we deplaned he asked me if we could be Facebook friends … when he gets the time and decides to make getting on social media a priority. Because, for now, his trip isn’t about social media. It’s about the ocean, his project and being grounded in reality.

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My colleague told everyone who received the email that she wanted to stuff our mutual friend’s mailbox with love, happiness and good thoughts. She asked us each to write a letter or postcard or mail something fun. Of course I jumped on board!

I wasn’t sure what to write, then I dug up a funky postcard and decided to send her a few of my favorite cheesy one liners. Even if other people don’t think they’re as funny as I do, they usually chuckle and shake their heads, dumbstruck by the goofiness of bad jokes.

It got me thinking that maybe I should take a stack of postcards and randomly send people postcards with happy quotes, one-line jokes or goofy drawings. A good piece of snail mail doesn’t necessarily go into detail about everything. It’s just a little piece of happiness addressed to someone who needs it most.

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The first is the holiday season, when people are weighted down by boxes and cranky children. During the holiday season, there never seems to be enough room in the post office because for every person, there are four or five boxes crowded around their feet. The days are dwindling when people stand in line with a stack of holiday cards that need to be mailed, but they are still making use of the mail services to deliver boxes.

The second time of the year when the post office makes me crazy are the days leading up to April 15, aka Tax Day. Even with the advent of e-filing and the fact that people have so much time to prepare their taxes, they still wait until the last minute to mail their forms in (and I can hardly blame them). The customers in the post office during tax time are not happy people. The winter holidays sometimes stress people out, but at least there’s something fun about the holidays too. Not so with April 15.

I don’t think the average person visits the post office anymore. She goes when she needs to mail an important document or a package, but the post office is not an everyday, average stop for her. As such, her experiences at the post office are limited, and when they include forays into this space during the most congested times of year, it’s no wonder people hate visiting the post office.

I stop by the post office perhaps once a month or so, when I restock my supply of fun stamps and mail any unusual pieces of correspondence. My experience has been that the USPS employees are helpful and interested; I’ve even had some help me pick out new postage. When people visit the post office as if it’s a chore that absolutely must be done because they’ve put it off long enough, I think they’re getting the wrong impression about the awesomeness that is the USPS. Think of how many pieces of mail are sorted and sent each day (though the amount of personal snail mail is dwindling). How does (almost) everything get to where it needs to go? How awesome is it that we can put tiny pieces of art on our envelopes to share with others? I think the post office is a place of activity and creative life … if people could look beyond it merely as the place from which to send boxes and checks to the tax man.

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Writing these letters became an adventure of sorts as I recounted every detail of every day, trying to fill pages. There was no need to keep a detailed journal; the girls I wrote to became my confidants as I worked through social problems, talked about teachers and provided information about extracurricular activities. If I didn’t have enough to write on any particular day, I’d write what came to me, then pick up again the next day or the day after that, dating each “entry” as I went along. With the change in dates and news came a change in handwriting, pen choice and mood. I remember liking the challenge of writing these letters. I liked sharing my life with my pen pals, and I enjoyed getting long, similar accounts from them on a regular basis too.

Just the other day I received a letter from a freind of mine that reminded me a lot of the snail mail sagas I used to craft as a kid. The letter was dated, and for a page and a half she updated me on what was going with her job. Then it picked up again with a new date and a new pen with a different colored ink. However, she wasn’t trying to write a certain number of pages or chronicle any particular events with a multi-page, multi-entry letter. Instead, she’s now like me, stealing time when she can to scribble a few sentences. The sagas I write these days are less about spending hours and hours spilling my soul to my friends and more about the lack of time I have to sit down and write one whole comprehensive letter at a time. These are letters contain multiple entries simply as a matter of convenience, and each section isn’t specific to that date—it’s simply what I was able to squeeze out at any given time.

When I read the multi-entry letter from my friend, I couldn’t help but smile because it reminded me so much of what I used to do as a kid … and unfortunately what I end up doing much to often these days.

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I frequently exchange letters with our first foreign exchange student, who lives in Slovakia. When I travel, I like to pick up postcards to send her way, but sending a postcard from every destination I visit would become cost prohibitive very fast, especially on trips where I visit more than one interesting place. On a road trip late last summer, I created the idea of a postcard package, which is a fun and much cheaper way to share my experiences with her. Every day (or at every interesting stop), I pick up a postcard, which I date and then write a short note about the site or what I did during the day. At the conclusion of my trip, I have several dated postcards already written, which I then send in a single envelope, often with a full-fledged letter. I always get this envelope weighed because it often weighs a little bit more than what a global Forever stamp covers, but it is so much more affordable than sending each postcard individually. Plus, our girl gets an eclectic collection of fun stuff in a single mail delivery.

I created the idea of the postcard package because of the cost, but I’ve come to love it for another reason: Each card is written en route, which means I don’t have to try to recreate the experience later. As time passes, my immediate thoughts and impressions fade, so taking just a few minutes to scribble something on the back of a postcard right away captures something that would be lost if I simply wrote one long letter at the conclusion of a trip (especially considering the fact that things like letter writing take a backseat immediately after I return from a trip). As our international family grows, it only makes sense that postcard packages become the norm rather than the exception when it comes to communication while I travel.

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Despite the fast pace of my trip, I managed to fit in a little bit of snail mail love. I sent a few postcards while I was overseas, which is sort of silly seeing as how I arrived in Dublin Friday morning, Sunday and Monday were both holidays, and I was back home by Monday night. Any postcards I sent likely won’t arrive in U.S. mailboxes until later this week, but that’s okay.

I also bought a couple of postcards for myself, which I’m planning on taping into my journal. I fell hard for a few things I discovered in Dublin, namely the doors and the awesome library at Trinity College. If given the chance to go back, you can be sure I’ll give more attention to both the books and colorful doorways!

While there, I also kept my eye out for the post box. Every country seems to have its own style and design for post boxes, and Ireland is no different. ‘St. Patrick’s blue’ is the name applied to several shades of blue that are considered symbolic to Ireland. It is so hard for me to imagine that blue was, in fact, considered the color of Ireland for such a long time. Today, most people associate green with the country, and so it’s probably not hard to believe that the post boxes are also green. Located on corners throughout Dublin’s streets, these mail collection containers were the place where I dropped off my postcards.

One other side note: I wish I’d taken a picture of the stamps I used to send the cards but I forgot. They had frogs on them, which I thought was funny because the frogs were green, which seemed perfectly logical to me.

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Though I follow our kids and a handful of travelers, dancers and cat fanatics, I find that another type of person I really enjoy following on Instagram is the snail mail enthusiast. I haven’t really figured out how they manage and execute mail swaps through Instagram (nor am I necessarily interested in participating in them), but I love the pictures of snail mail they post (it’s one of the things I love most about snail mail-focused blogs too). There’s just something particularly appealing about photographs of mail.

Some people are incredibly crafty, and I am beyond impressed with what people are able to create with a myriad of art supplies. But there’s something else about these photographs of mail that intrigue me: While I can see the collage-created, pen-drawn, stamped envelopes, there is always a mystery about what’s inside. As beautiful and intriguing as mail art might be, only two people are privy to knowing what’s inside: the sender and the recipient.

I think this is one of the reasons I have always been excited for the mail to arrive. Six days a week (for now), there is the great unknown of what is in the mailbox. Then, once you collect the mail from the mailbox, there is the second great unknown of what is in each of the envelopes.

A friend of mine only checks her mail once a week because she says the only thing she ever finds in her box is junk, but she doesn’t write snail mail like I do. To me, the built-in anticipation of the snail mail mystery is like getting ready to open Christmas presents six days a week. And maybe it’s what I like about following snail mail junkies like myself on Instagram. Just as I don’t know what is inside each of the envelopes that arrives in my mailbox, I have no idea what interesting image of mail art will be published in my feed next.

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At the turn of the new year, this same person posted on Facebook that, in 2013, she was setting the goal to read four books. Four. Books. Not per month. Not even per quarter. Four book over the course of the year.

I understand that not everyone likes to read. It’s not easy for everyone, and it takes time and effort that some people don’t think they have available. Nonetheless, I believe that one of the keys to becoming a better writer is to read. A lot. Everything. All the time. I don’t think I read nearly enough—my goal this year is to read 30 books and I also read dozens of magazines and long form pieces over the course of any given month—but to read only four books in a year? I was not only surprised but saddened to hear that someone who wants to make her living as a writer reads so infrequently.

Now, this person was talking about writing for magazines, newspapers and in other public spaces, not letter writing like I talk about on this blog. And certainly, to write handwritten, personal letters to others doesn’t require studying storytelling tactics or strong sentence mechanics. Nonetheless, I’ve been chewing on the relationship between reading and writing for awhile now, and I would be willing to bet that people who love letter writing also read a lot. People who love to learn about other people through letters are possibly interested in reading stories. Letter writers also know to set aside time for something they love to do, and, for many people, reading is a hobby that gets pushed to the side. Understanding the importance of making time for a passion is something snail mail enthusiasts understand. And maybe it’s just that creative, innovative side of us letter writers that leads me to believe they also like to read.

So, I’m curious, are you a letter writer and a reader? Do you think the two are connected in any way?

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