Correspondence

Dear Kara:

In one of your last letters, you asked me where I got my beautiful stationery. I couldn't have been more pleased with the question. So, let me tell you.

1. My vintage stamps come mostly from my grandma. I have been known to buy them in bulk on ebay though. These below ones I'm going to frame. I just love them too much to send anywhere.

 2. After grad school, when I was unemployed, I thought I might make a living making envelopes out of paper grocery bags. The business didn't really take off. Therefore, I have a bunch of these.

3. My dear pal carved out the Amelia stamp. Isn't it sweet?

 Sonya's getting a Gandhi-centric letter!

 4. And then, sometimes, a card is too pretty not to purchase.

So, there you have it!
One of these will make their way to you soon.

Much much love,
Amelia




8/23/12

Dear Amelia,

I feel like writing this whole response with exclamation points.  And capital letters.  I have, for yes a month now, been trying to summon the discipline/time/follow-through to upload a post for you titled Correspondences I Have Known.  I literally bike around my little town (getting two flats on two separate bikes - a sign from the biking gods??) plotting out my clever post.  And here you beautifully, telepathically, upload an exquisite portfolio of correspondence-related things, whilst managing to bring us close yet again to your weird, wild, and would we have it any other way?, Grandma. 

Perhaps it is time to tell the story, then?  The story of our beginnings. 

It was a Friday - my favorite day of the week in grad school.  Fridays when one is in school are so different from Fridays when one is in the regular old work world.  In the regular old work world, Fridays are met with haggard, over-caffeinated, emotionally drunken relief, and escalate through the day with fantasies of all the fun that all the weekend will hold, and culminate in the pinch of rushing from the office finally to jam all that wonderfulness into the fast slipping-awayness of Friday evening's clock. 

This is a bit cynical, no?  Also, for those of us not working in an office, ahem, maybe this is a way off description.  Alas, it was a Friday, a spring Friday, and in grad school for me, those were nap days, sunny breezy windows-open days, slow uncurling respite days.  And it was capped off with an outdoor reading at the home of really nice, really stylish folks. At which you, whom I considered really nice and really stylish and therefore out of my league (!!), read a funny, touching, and beautifully-structured essay about your Grandma, that forever endeared you to me.   

I don't know when, exactly, I got the idea to write to you and request a copy of the essay, but it was long after you graduated and left us in the dust of your California-bound dreams.  Then I followed a year later, heading west to Colorado (where I really learned the ways of dust) and it was still after that that I wrote to you.  You emailed the story, I emailed back, and at some point, long-hand started creeping into the picture.  (That sounds irreparably dirty.  My apologies, friends.) 

And the rest, as they say, is history - captured in Colorado by really nice and really stylish paper crafts sent to me from LA.  And though I love our friendship for a million and one reasons, it is exquisitely luxurious to receive such simple gifts from the world.  Er, rather, from you.

And so.  Thank you, those who patiently waded through all this sappy prose.  I promise some images - and Correspondences I Have Known - soon!

xxoo,
Kara