Postal joys

I received so many goodies in the mail yesterday! All in one go, too.

There was a letter from Katy Roe in Arizona, which was very nice.  I love her stationary lined with fleurs-de-lis (one of my favorite symbols, as I am a total québécois/français wannabe).  It's very good of her to stay in touch with me this way.

That was followed by a letter from Otto, my 3rd cousin, twice removed, in Illkirch, France.  It is proving fairly arduous to maintain contact with our Swiss relatives, and, aside from my great uncle Ken, I am the only one holding the torch.  Therefore, I wrote to Otto to inquire about other parties within the family interested in keeping in touch, particularly those closer in age to me.  Otto is very old now (92), hence my feeling of urgency in acquiring contact information for some of the other cousins.  His English is a bit rusty, even though I wrote a lot in French too, so there was a lot of confusion as to the intention of my letter.  He seemed to think I was looking for an exchange family, when all I had mentioned about that was the time I had visited them while on my foreign exchange, back in 2006.  Anyway, it was not very helpful, other than he did give me my cousin Christiane's address, so I repeated my inquiry to her.  She just tends to be a lousy correspondant.

I then received a packet from my Australian love, Katie Day, who lives in Brisbane.  It contained a lengthy and charming letter from Katie, along with two short stories she has written, which I am reading here this morning.  Very exciting! She is a lovely person altogether.

This may seem odd, but I can get really jealous of letters.  For example, I will write a nice, long letter and mail it off to Australia.  I look at the words on the paper and think, "You're going to be in Australia soon." Halfway around the world in a place I have fervently longed to go.  Then I walk into my kitchen with an envelope from France sitting on the counter, with its Lady Liberty stamps that say la poste across the bottom.  This piece of paper has just come from France.  Would that it was me.  It definitely costs a lot more to send yourself across the sea.