Tag Archives: letter

have a heart.

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“Dear Sidewalk People.”

That’s how 9-year-old Dahlia started her handwritten note placed under a rock along a city sidewalk hoping to get the attention of Ann Arbor’s crews slated to replace the slab she holds dear due to a distinctive feature.

This sidewalk has a heart.

“There is a heart in this block, and as me and my mom were walking home from school, we saw that there was an ‘R’ on the block that the heart is on,” reads the girl’s note, placed next to where she made a heart-shaped chalk outline around a small cavity in the slab the city has marked with an R to replace.

“You see, the heart is not just a heart,” wrote Dahlia, “Ever since I was little, I said hi to the heart. Don’t you see how much it means to me? Every time I pass the heart, I say hi and it brings me joy.”

Her father confirmed his daughter indeed says “hi, heart” every time she passes it. When she heard the city was going to replace the slab with the heart, Dahlia said she was devastated and cried.

“So can you please leave it or at least cut around the heart, for me to pick up on my way to school,” she wrote, ending her note by thanking the city’s repair crews for their work to keep sidewalks safe and encouraging them to give her note an extra read so it makes sense.

A spokesperson for the city’s public services unit did not have an immediate response on whether the sidewalk slab could be saved or whether the heart-shaped part could be salvaged for Dahlia to take.

While Dahlia really wanted to keep the heart sidewalk, her father said the family understands the need to fix it so people don’t trip and has talked with her about it.

“We compared it to the Halloween pumpkin she really loved and wanted to keep,” he said. “We told her we could keep it, but we could watch how when a pumpkin dies it helps nature by becoming part of something new.”

In that case, they put the pumpkin in their garden and Dahlia visited it every day and watched it decay, and in the spring she watched as flowers sprung up. She got to see her pumpkin again in the form of flowers.

As for her well-crafted sidewalk note, her father said while only 9, Dahlia is an amazing writer and gives him and his wife daily gems of wisdom worthy of the wisest, aged writers.

“sometimes the people who walk softly make the deepest impressions…” 

-nitya prakash

 

source credit: ryan stanton, mlive, ann arbor

off the beaten path.

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Traveling is important, because when we do, we’re able to de-stress, discover new things, meet people and gain stories worth telling. One man who visited West Iceland was so grateful to his hosts that he decided to send them a letter when he reached Reykjavik, the country’s capital. But there was a problem: he didn’t know his hosts’ address. However, he did remember where they lived. So instead of never sending the letter, the tourist instead draws a map on the envelope. He wrote:

“Country: Iceland.
City: Búðardalur.
Name: A horse farm with an Icelandic/Danish couple and three kids and a lot of sheep!”

He also thoughtfully added that “the Danish woman works in a supermarket in Búðardalur”. Judging by the amount of details the tourist wrote on the envelope, they really wanted the farm owners to get the letter. And to everyone’s surprise, the letter did make it, despite its lack of traditional postal information. This proves that even though things have definitely become more modern, Iceland’s local postal service still know their territory by heart.

Rebecca Cathrine Kaadu Ostenfeld was stunned when the postman handed it to her. It goes without saying that receiving a letter from someone is a touching experience. Their home was indicated on the map with a glaring red dot, after all. But it seems that the letter’s successful delivery was brought about because of the farm’s fame.

The humble “horse farm” that the tourist had described on the envelope, was in fact somewhat of a tourist attraction in Hvammsveit, West Iceland. It’s quite famous for its ‘mini zoo’ where guests can pet their resident horses, goats, sheep, pigs and other animals. And it seems that this particular guest had such a great time that he couldn’t help but show his appreciation long after he’d left! The Hólar family’s farm does have an address listed online (But if you click on it, the link will redirect you to the middle of a lake! So maybe that’s why their tourist had trouble writing down a proper postal address and his map was more accurate than Google.)

“people tend to want to follow the beaten path.

the difficulty is that the beaten path doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere.”

-charles mathias

 

 

 

credits: awesome inventions

 

breathings.

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the long letter

written on the outside of my valentine

was even more important

than the card inside

 the kinder who worked very hard to write it all down

read it out loud to me

confident, proud, with voice inflections, hands moving

and so much to say.

“fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”

-william wordsworth

return to sender.

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i recently made halloween cards

for all of my grandies and nieces

and sent them out early

to make sure they arrived in time

imagine my surprise 

when i opened my mailbox

and found a letter 

that i had sent out  

a day earlier

only to have the post office 

deliver it back to me

instead of sending it on ahead

somehow they had managed

to process it on the back of the envelope

and decided that my return address sticker 

was where it should be delivered

i often wonder about their logic

and am pleasantly surprised

when things actually get

to where i had intended them to go

 i will try again tomorrow 

and tell them that it should go

to where the mailing address is

on the front of the letter.

“you know you’re a fool when what you’re doing

makes even the post office seem efficient.”

-joshua cohen

give what you have.

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found this sweet surprise

waiting for me in my mailbox

a very old tiny sleigh with a handwritten letter

from a neighbor i’ve never met

who’s lived nearby for over 50 years

she left it for me to add to my fairy garden

when the season is right

she took the trouble to repaint the sleigh

and write me this lovely note

wanting to visit the garden

but too shy to stop by to see it up close

it was such a kind and thoughtful gesture

i wanted to thank her and figured out where she lived

then wrote her a long letter back

to let her know

how much i enjoyed her special gift

and what it meant to me

i really hope that we meet in person in my garden one day.

“give what you have. to someone, it may be better than you dare to think.”
― henry wadsworth longfellow

letters.

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dear mom –

“just a few photos from xmas. still having shutterfly problems so thought i’d better at least send something. felix is talking, saying ‘car, ear, nose’ and magnus is crying over patsy cline songs. just back from swimming at ellen’s house with the dairy cows watching us from the other side of the fence. terry has his triathlon in two weeks then he can finally relax and not train every night. had our outdoor movie night on the weekend and it was great, everyone had fun and the kids got to stay up late and be maniacs.

what’s going on at home?”

❤ love, holli

(a glimpse of life from my daughter who was living far away in australia at the time)

 here’s to

national handwritten letter day

in honor of one of my favorite things.

“letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.”

-johann wolfgang von goethe

a tree by any other name……

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melbourne assigned some of its trees

numbers and email addresses

so that residents could report problems

like low hanging branches.

instead, thousands of people wrote them love letters.

what would you write to them?

“if you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.”

-khalil gibran

credit: mentalfloss, the atlantic