Spin-off Mail

The most touching spin-off happened from the Need Less, Give More experiment. My friend, Teresa revealed on my birthday that she is doing an experiment of her own. She decided to send one card or letter of encouragement and love to someone every week until my next birthday. Not an email, not a phone call, but a real life, snail-mail card.

I love her idea and I love the response she is already getting. In fact, she said having the goal to send one letter a week has made her think of others she would like to send and she has ended up sending more than one each week since my birthday. She wrote this in an email: "Oh, interesting thing, Wendy. Instead of just writing one person I find myself sending several…those things I had meant to do,…. Sympathy, wedding anniversary, birthday…just had not done them yet. Maybe the “fruit” of this experiment is to motivate me to do the “I should." Hmmmm."

There is just something so warm and exciting about receiving a real letter in the mail. I've received a couple from Teresa myself and I always get a thrill when I see the hand-addressed envelope. It's really the only thing that makes me keep getting the mail at all. I'm not a big fan of mail usually. I would give anything to be able to stop the junk mail and intercept the unwanted solicitations before they end up in my mailbox. I try to pick off the mail slowly piece by piece by calling the junk-mail senders and asking them to take me off their list, but it's a laborious process and doesn't seem to net good results. I still get a lot of junk mail I don't want. Someday I hope they come up with a do-not-send list like the do-not-call list for telephone solicitations.

But now I'm getting off the point. My point is this: personal letters = good. Junk mail = bad. Teresa and her year-long experiment = lovely.

Movement

I've been drinking in the smell of summer rain tonight. It's one of my very favorite smells. I could hardly make myself move off the steps in my back yard, but the rain finally drove my inside after I took several long, soulful breaths. Tonight the rain smells like tears and my heart is crying even if my eyes haven't yet. My friend Teresa is moving to Georgia tomorrow and I have been bottling up the emotion of it for weeks. I've known in my mind that she was going for quite a while. We've been on the "last time" lookout for months, but it always seemed so far away. All along I've been sure that at the last minute something would happen and she and her husband would end up staying. I'm very good at denial.

But today the movers started marching their things out of their house and tonight as we sat on her patio drinking wine and watching the lights twinkle over Utah Lake I finally understood that she was leaving. I wondered out loud if I would eventually know the people who move into her house when she leaves, but I can't imagine that I would want to. The place that has been such a peaceful and welcoming retreat for me over the last year really has nothing to do with that house and I can't imagine seeing it without her there.

Sometime soon I will write about Teresa and what her sparkling friendship means to me. Tonight I'm standing in a puddle and trying not to get my heart too wet.