Asakiyume mita

You've heard of USPS Forever stamps, but how about Wherever stamps?



I got a letter from my friend C, who was in Barcelona recently.

"Oooh, a letter from C from overseas!" I thought. Then I looked at the stamp and saw it was a US international stamp. I know these well, as we have family in the UK and Japan, so I buy them often.

"Hmmm, so, she must have sent this letter when she got home," I thought. "But in that case, why did she use an international stamp? ... And why is the cancellation in Spanish?" But the letter was kind of heavy, so I decided she must have used the international stamp to cover the extra cost. As for the cancellation, well, Spanish is a widely used language in this country, so maybe her post office in Pittsburgh just happened to have a Spanish cancellation stamp.

I sent her a text saying how the stamp had confused me, but I'd figured things out.

She replied:

I sent it from Spain! I just happened to have some leftover international stamps and I didn’t even think that they wouldn’t work in the Spanish mail system, LOL! I didn’t even think about that until now!

Mind = Blown

I looked at the cancellation again, and sure enough, you can just make out "Barcelona" over the stamp. (If you click through to Flickr, you can see it larger.)

So the Spanish postal clerk either didn't notice, or saw it and thought, "Eh, it's a stamp--good enough."

And now I'm thinking how great it would be if we had international postal reciprocity like that! (Although I really enjoy foreign stamps, so I wouldn't want *everyone* to use their own postage overseas.)

Note: I was so mindblown by the US stamp passing in Spain that I wondered if I've been wrong all this time and you can use your own nation's stamps to mail things home from another nation, and the answer is no. No, you can't.

Here is a Spanish international-mail stamp:

Today I went out to mail a letter, walking through the woods, like I did the day I dropped a card by a pine tree. It was much warmer today, but the path through the woods was still covered with ice. If I had been wearing ice skates, I could have sped along it, my own tiny Rideau Canal.



On the way back from the post office, the clouds were thickening and the wind picked up, and I worried about trees falling on me. I never used to worry about this in the woods, but winds that bring down trees are much more common now. At home, I picked up mail from our postbox... and there was this postcard:



It's from minoanmiss --she sent it for me to share with the pine tree.

Isn't that great?

Next time I walk that route, I promise I will! Thank you, MM!

Some time ago Mike Allen was looking for some more ARC readers for A Sinister Quartet (a quartet of novellas by CSE Cooney, Jessica Wick, Amanda McGee, and Mike Allen himself), and I expressed an interest, and so he put a copy in the mail for me.

And time went by, and the foursome did a reading (preserved on Youtube), each sharing part of their novella, and when that happened, I dropped Mike a line saying I really would read and review, but that the book still hadn't arrived yet--and he sent me the tracking number, and it looked like it had gotten as far as the nearby city of Springfield, but not managed to make it to my town.

No worries, we both agreed--it would come eventually. In the meantime, he sent me a digital ARC. About a week more went by, and still the package hadn't come. Still "in transit." I noticed that there was a 1-800 number you could call, so I decided to do that.

"If you haven't received mail for two days, press one," the recording said. "If you haven't received mail for three or four days, press two."

Well, we've been getting mail, so I didn't press either of those. The recording continued, saying that in this time of COVID-19, they're working with reduced numbers and under difficult circumstances, and that they're trying very hard to make sure that mail gets through, especially important things like people's medicines, but that there are some delays due to...

... And at that point I was overwhelmed by shame and sadness. What the hell was I doing?? I had an electronic copy of the book! Why was I calling? It would come when they were able to bring it! There were people waiting on medicine, for crying out loud! And I thought about the two young women at my local post office, so cheerful and friendly, how gradually protections were put in place for them--plastic screens and masks, but still how hard it is--people come in, people who need money orders, people picking up packages--me, mailing a package to Japan--and they're there, dealing with every person. And thought about how hard all of this is.

And I hung up the phone and instantly felt better.

And later that day, the package arrived.