Yesterday, a neighbour came by to drop off a letter my best friend had mailed me from Virginia just ten days before (and this after the postcard I sent her took almost a month!).

It wasn’t until I went to Mexico, with its so unreliable as to be useless postal system, that I began to realise just how freaking amazing the global postal system is. It’s an incredible model of international cooperation! How is it that someone could have dropped something off at the post office in Latvia and it’s in my mailbox in Saskatchewan just a week later? Never mind stuff that comes from China!

Sure, mail gets lost or stolen sometimes. Some shipping prices are unreasonable. Sometimes things take forever to go just a few kilometres, never mind around the world. But the amount of times mail just works is staggering. When SaskTel gave me my iPhone, I sold my iPod Touch on eBay. The buyer wanted the cheapest possible way to get it to him in New York state with no insurance or tracking. I wrapped it up in a bubble envelope and had to clearly mark the contents for customs. Anyone between SK and NY could have pocketed the iPod with no one the wiser, but it got there.

I was ridiculously excited to get mail yesterday, almost as excited that the post card I’d sent had arrived. There’s just something about receiving an item that was touched by a loved one half a world away to make you feel infinitely more connected than you ever could by just email.

One of the best parts of getting mail from Bast is the stickers she puts on the envelopes. This one on the reverse, one of three to make sure the flap was well sealed, made me burst out laughing: