78 cents

When I was young, my Mum's uncle wrote me letters throughout the year. Small accounts of his travels, his aspirations, his day-to-day. The leaf like paper was decorated with shaky sketches of his front door or his newly purchased RV.
On the top right corner of each letter, he carefully slanted his script to show the day, month, year, temperature, time, and the city or town where he sat and wrote.

There is nothing like going to the mailbox and finding a letter.

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Whenever I write a letter or a postcard, lick the back of a stamp, drop it in an ominous yellow box on a side street with blue letters reading "Correos", or in broken Spanish, place it in the hands of an elderly woman, I think to my self: how does such a small thing make its way all the way across the world?

Inevitably, I worry that something may happen - the wind may snatch it out of the arms of its carrier; the plane suddenly leaves, forgetting the package stuffed with handwritten love letters, cursive condolences, birthday pop-ups; and sometimes, I think it made it, all the way to Arbordale, or 47th street, when a mad rottweiler unexpectedly sneaks up behind an average sized whistling postman, and tears apart the contents of his bag.

Whew… The unpromising worries of a letter writer!

When it rains in Madrid, something extraordinary happens.
If you run up a few flights of stairs and glance off of the balcony or through a foggy window, you will find a sea off fluttering umbrellas. The streets become a flood of acrylic octagons and hidden faces.

The man, dragging a dark blue satchel down the street, pausing for a cafe solo, and returning to the sidewalk, for a moment, tips the temporary plastic shelter in between his shoulder and right ear. He opens the yellow treasure box and grabs a handful of addressed papers. Shivering, he shoves them in his roll-along bag and continues to walk.

Maybe they arrive, a bit worn, illegible, the black pen smudged. Is this why? Perhaps.

The carriers, whoever they may be, are of great service to me. The letters, despite my worries, seem to find their way across the ocean, through the plains, over corn fields, atop the snow and into the hands that I wished. At these moments, the “World of Post," though quite perplexing, simply delivers.