Or – how we used to communicate before email…
I don’t know about you, but I wrote a lot of letters when I was young. We lived in a reasonably remote part of the world and most of my extended family lived in the city. So snail mail, as we now call it, was the only way to communicate with my grandparents.
Did I mention we didn’t even have a telephone back then?
In the course of writing a lot of letters, I managed to find a Pen Pal who lived out the back-of-beyond in the Northern Territory. I can’t remember her name, but the name of her father has never been forgotten.
I was still in primary school at the time, so I was probably about ten years old.
My father’s name was Tom.
My pen-pal’s father’s name was Left Hand Jack.
I looked forward to her letter the minute my letter to her was signed, sealed and posted. Patience is a virtue, and one that I probably should have been cultivating a little more earnestly.
I watched the mailbox like a hawk, eagerly awaiting her reply.
Sometimes her letter would begin with… “I haven’t written because we went walkabout…”.
I loved having a pen-pal, and it seems history might be repeating itself.
This morning while checking my emails, I discovered an initiative launched by Australia Post to connect seniors in Australia the old fashioned, snail mail way.
While the system isn’t open to individuals, it is accessible by a representative of an over-55 organisation. Well, who could resist?
I promptly filled out the form and emailed it off. It’s a little ironic that I didn’t have to hand-write the form and post it. But then this could be the ideal merge of both worlds – email and snail-mail.
I’ve signed us up in the hope that those in the Village who don’t have ready access to technology, or just love the art of hand-writing a letter, will start to communicate with seniors across this vast land of ours.
And since restricted-movements are going to be a part of our lives for a while yet, how good would it be to find out what life is like in other retirement villages?
Australia Post even supplies fancy paper templates that I can print off for anyone who wants to get onboard the pen-pal project.
My application to get us connected with pen-pals has been acknowledged, so I’ll keep you posted (pardon the pun….).
Acknowledgement: Images above are courtesy of members of Pixabay.com. Thank you Pixabay for your outstanding service.
