Nothing special in this picture...just mailboxes.

My reason for posting it is in remembrance of the passing of an American staple...the excitement of getting the daily mail. Is the mail giving way to the same fate as phone booths? When is the last time you saw a phone booth...I mean the payphone on the corner with the accordion door and the receiver dangling by the chrome jointed cord.

Mailboxes, I fear are meeting the same end. Albeit...email is much more efficient and time sensitive. We now take it for granted when we receive an email with a Pdf attachment within seconds of requesting it. Days past...we would wait for a week to receive the document in the mail. Online bill paying now lets us wait until the day the bill is due to pay...rather than sending the payment one week in advance just to make sure it got there.

However, we may no longer get to literally "feel" the presence of communication from a loved one. The tactile excitement of walking to the mailbox in anticipation of the letter...holding it and reading in real handwriting the thoughts of our loved ones is such a personal experience...I miss that. My son is 23 years old...raised in the digital age...a great kid but has never sent us a handwritten letter...many emails...just not handwritten. I was recently rummaging through an old trunk we have...reading letters that I sent to my wife when we were dating, reading letters written to me by my mom when I was traveling for an extended period in Europe many years ago...these are priceless to me now. Hard drives crash, we are notorious for not backing up our data and those communications would have been lost forever if not handwritten on paper. To see the actual handwriting of my mother who passed away several years ago is a part of her that I can still see and not have to rely on memory. This will be lost as we move more and more into digital communication.

Don't get me wrong...I love computers, the wonders of Google, the blogging world and all the enrichment these tools can bring to our lives and would not want to give them up. But we are really losing something so personal when we give up the daily mail.

Think about it...when is the last time you received a personal handwritten letter? Nothing can replace that. I am going to write someone a letter this week.