I like the notion of keeping in touch.  Maybe that’s one reason I like to blog…(but only one… it’s really about images for me…).  Back in 2009 my friend Ellen began writing me a postcard every day as a way to keep in touch (AND to use up post cards kicking around the drawers) and so began the “SNAIL BLOG”…

Though we are old friends and have old ties, our current lives are very different.  We live in very different parts of the country, I love and use the internet a lot…they have no connection until they go into town for wifi.  And so on.  By the time 100 cards had been sent Ellen was saying goodbye to the snail blog…

But then…she realized she liked it.  She liked hunting for cards, she liked noting down a few thoughts about each day…and she knew, at the other end, I am an “archivist”…and that one day she’d get all the cards back and have a journal of sorts.  The snail blog shifted gears.  There were “series” of cards …”Evening,” “Domestic Interiors (a personal favorite),” “Men,” “Multiple Images,”…and then cards that are favorites like this one of Gibson’s bakery in Oberlin, Ohio…which Ellen sends over and over as she visits Oberlin on numerous road trips to visit family….

The snail blog is a constant little voice in my ear telling of blue skies, of clouds, of happy days and sad, of pancake stacks and cookie making for Christmas (note:  people in Vermont eat A LOT of cookies!)…and of her love of life and the people in it…including me.  And so… a milestone approached…

…and with the increase of postage, the nasty little shirt stamps have disappeared in favor of apples…and on we go…

Over my computer is a little saying nicely rendered in calligraphy by the artist Charles Heaney, given to us as a gift by Marge Riley.  I keep it there as a reminder…

“Do not save your loving speeches…for your friends till they are dead.  Do not write them on their tombstones, speak them rather now instead.”