Posthaste

What could be more fun than a book you can’t put down. Thanks to a friend’s recommendation, right now for me that book is “The Correspondent” by Virgina Evans. So not to spoil it, I will only say it is an epistolary novel. The plot thickens through the exchange of letters between the characters.

The story led me to think that maybe the next best thing to a good book is a handwritten letter showing up in your mailbox. But when did I last write one? Or, when a quick thank you note was in order, how often did I default to email or text? Sure, it’s the thought that counts but it simply isn’t the same. A handwritten letter has a special magic. You can feel a heartbeat behind a handwritten letter. Holding and reading it, ruminating over its contents, even saving it for future reference provides a calming screen-free moment.

I’ve boxes of letters from my beloved parents; from college classmates written back and forth over miles and decades about marriage, children, divorce, professions, illness, incalculable losses and lucky gains; and from old boyfriends…or should I say young old boyfriends or young former boyfriends or formerly young boyfriends given that by now any of them who are still standing are certifiably old. But I digress. Then there are the unexpected one-time letters of congratulations and encouragement. I’m certain the senders had no idea the life-changing impact those letters would have. Years later I can return to the original missive, feel the sender’s presence and personality preserved in the unique and familiar script, and be buoyed all over again by their cheerleading.

Roughly the same time the United States Postal Service got underway in 1775, my ancestors started a sealing wax business in Edinburgh, Scotland. A special blend of beeswax and resin used since the Middle Ages, sealing wax was colored with vermillion, verdigris, lampblack or red lead and then molded into a stick roughly the size of a short carpenter pencil with an embedded string wick. When a seal for a letter or document was needed, the wick was lit, the wax dripped over the fold of the envelope and a signet, often bearing the family crest, was used to emboss the wax seal in place. Fast forward to the 19^th century and here came gummed envelopes. Next up, latex. The handwriting (no pun intended) was on the wall. What did it say? Efficiency, typically the generally accepted bottom-line reason for changing how things are done. After a quarter of a century the business closed. But not the USPS. Mail is still delivered to my mailbox! Some institutions we depend on still stand. But before we get too carried away, let’s check the handwriting on the wall.

With the mid-term elections this November we’d best be alert to any modifications to the postal service. I want to believe a recently announced change in postal policy was in the name of cost-efficiency and not for nefarious reasons on the part of the current administration. As of December 2025 a letter is no longer postmarked when you drop it off at your local post office and won’t be until it arrives at a designated central postal facility. This means if an application or tax payment or mail-in ballot needs to be postmarked by a certain date you had better plan ahead. “Mail-in ballot” is the operative here. Something’s fishy especially in view of the parallel campaign to falsely discredit the reliability of the USPS. Trump’s stated short-term goal? Eliminate mail-in ballots in November’s elections. Long term? Privatize the USPS. There are a million reasons why every American citizen should oppose privatization. Increase efficiency, sure, but don’t privatize. It’s one more example of trusted institutions and policies being disparaged and/or dismantled based on disinformation. But back to this coming November. If the campaign against mail-in ballots succeeds everyone would have to go to a polling station, inconvenient at best and sometimes impossible for many Americans. Given the growing threat of federal troop interference at these locations, it’s also scary, but that’s the idea.

Normally in my columns, when I am up against my eight-hundred-word limit, I try to tie things up in a bow, often, for one reason or another, advocating that the over-the-hill gang flex its socially conscious muscle… such as writing letters in protest of privatizing the postal service. But lately I’m feeling a bit dispirited and confused as to which wheel to put my shoulder to. Maybe instead I’ll just make a cup of tea, sit down, and for the first time in ages, write a long, handwritten letter to someone I love or someone who could use a little encouragement and then slowly savor the last pages of “The Correspondent.”

This article appears in the Source January 22, 2026.