You’ve got mail.

Remember the Mailbox?  I mean that metallic can with a door, stuck up on some post. It is usually found along a town road, at the end of a driveway, at least in the rural town that I grew up in. The mailbox is one of my favorite places in the yard. Although, no, it’s not a feature begging for exhibit in prominent Landscape Architecture magazines. It is just a functional item.

My mailbox is a dented gray can on a 2” pipe stuck in a tubular shaped base of concrete. It’s not even a permanent feature. The snow plow, bored high school students travelling on our lane, and even an occasional falling branch from the big oak trees spread out overhead, have endeavored to reposition it. It is just a plain, ugly thing, and yet it is a portal. Every day things are deposited in that can, things for me, Tracy, the kids, the current resident, or postal patron. And every day, I look forward to pulling up to the mailbox, in my truck, as I arrive home from work, to see if there are any goodies in there for me.

Yes Folks….Goodies. I love mail. I’m sure that’s not too much of a surprise to those of you, my friends, who know me and to whom I shoot off various E-mails, letters, notes, chats, tweets and pokes to on a regular basis. Here, though I am talking about mailbox mail. The tangible stuff. Stuff I can read, no matter whether I’m in the truck, sitting at the fire pit, sitting on the couch or laying in bed. Now maybe I’m not talking about the mail that says I owe $400 for an oil delivery or that the mortgage is due. Really, I don't look forward to those letters. You can keep ‘em, Billing Departments!!

I DO, however, love my magazines, postcards, letters, packages from my professional organizations, DVDs and books from clubs…you get the picture. These are little presents. Stuff for me to open, stuff that I enjoy reading or looking at, delivered to me, each day, at MY mailbox. Automatically. I just show up at the mailbox, and there they are, all shiny and packaged in plastic, or tucked into big brown packs, or crisp white letter envelopes.

I have loved mail since I was a kid. My brother and I used to sign up for all the seed catalogues, free calendars and farm catalogues advertized in the Old Farmers Almanac. From then on, every day, we would get little presents from the postman. Craft-matic adjustable beds spent a lot of money on paper and postage on account of my brother. He took the the love of mail even a few steps forward and wrote to a dozen or so pen pals around the globe. I had a pen pal for a while, too…Nimi Ibrahim from someplace in India. A letter from Nimi was like Christmas. The idea that somebody, somewhere in the world, was thinking of me and took the time to jot down their thoughts on paper and send them to me was so wonderful.

Most of the mail I get now is in the form of magazines. I love my magazines! Every Friday, Entertainment Weekly, and once or twice a month I get Discover, National Geographic, Men’s Health, Rolling Stone, POB, ACSM Bulletin, Salis, People en Español, The Benchmark, The TBM, American Heritage and my newest, Hobby Farms. These are what I look forward to, they provide so many hours of entertainment or education, or both.

So I have an idea, which actually prompted this blog posting. It would be fun to receive and send stuff from my friends and readers who follow my blog, here and through Twitter or Face book.

Send me a note or a postcard. Or put a signed picture of yourself, or a copy of your favorite take-out menu, or a small coin or item from your locale. I’ll follow up with something of the like from here in Cheshire County. I think it would be fun to start correspondence with others from around the country or around the globe and have something more tangible that a few bytes of data on a server somewhere. Maybe if it turns out successfully, I’ll start a blog series about the stuff I get, where it comes from, depending on how much, if any, response I get.

You can send mail or postcards to:

Russ Huntley
331 Poocham Road
Westmoreland, New Hampshire, USA 03467

 

We’ll see how the experiment goes. I’ll let you know.