Letters

I forgot to send my grandmother her birthday card. I’ve become too busy to drop a card to my grandmother two days before her birthday. Most family members I send an e-card to them right around the day of their birthday is cheaper and more earth-friendly that way. However, it is also further proof to me that the art of letter writing is dying.

I have actually been thinking about this a lot lately. With my purchase of an iPhone, my parents learning how to text message, and emailing sometimes being a faster way to get a hold of some one than calling them we are more connected than ever these days. But the passion seems to have fallen out of those communications. It’s everyday and mundane, but we love it. Call me nostalgic, but I like going out to my mail box to find more than bills and junk.

When I was in high school I had a few pen pals. People I’d met at different functions and wrote back and forth with about monthly. This was in the late ‘90s when internet was starting to become a normal thing in the American household and I could have just as easily written emails back and forth but it wouldn’t have been the same. There’s something that goes in to sitting down and writing a letter to some one: picking out the stationary, what pen you’ll use, what you are and aren’t going to mention. There is so much more effort in that then writing 140 characters or less about your morning coffee. And really, if you think about it, not many people care about the mundane day to day things that we do in our life. In fact, there’s a line that we cross all too frequently in our over connectedness.

I’m not saying that I want to go back to a day when letter writing was the main form of communication, I would just like to revive the hand-written word. It shouldn’t be a dying art, but sadly it is.

Respite

When I arrived home last night my house had changed from Pepto-Bismol pink to a relaxing sky blue. I never realized how much I hated that our house was pink until that transformation occurred.

Hubby and I moved in to our current home about two and a half years ago. We bought the pink house on short sale because the house was great and all it would take was some paint to change one of the few things we didn’t like. A quick fix. Time, as it always does, intervened. More important things came up between moving in to the house and present day that the exterior color of the house became less a priority. Finally, with the wood siding exposing more of itself, and the shabbiness of the pink paint becoming more apparent we booked a painter.

The thought of changing the feel of the exterior completely nearly made Hubby and I giddy as we walked in to the paint store to face the overwhelming wall of paint chips. It took us half an hour and thirty or so paint chips held under various lights to decide between two colors. A light true-blue and a light shade of blue-gray. We took home sample sizes of each to paint on the side of the house. After a week at the coast, and realizing we live in Oregon where the sky is a shade of gray for most of the year, we decided on the light true-blue or “Respite”.

It’s true that if you change the color of something it will illicit a different reaction. Now, when I pull into my driveway and look up at my house I don’t loathe the look of it. I look at my home and my shoulders relax a little and as I pull my car in to the garage I begin to enjoy my respite.