Mysterious mail ...

Top (right and left) Envelope and letter from France. Bottom (right and left) my collage card written in return.

As a person who is sometimes in the habit of exchanging mail art with person or persons unknown, it shouldn't really come as a surprise to have something unexpected and beautiful slide through the mail slot in my otherwise mundane front door. Last week I received an elegant white envelope from a mysterious stranger in France. From the arresting image on the front of the envelope to the single sheet of dreamily poetic prose inside, it was truly an enigma wrapped in a riddle.

My long-distant high school French classes came back to me in bits and pieces, but well enough for me to extract the letter's meaning ... once I'd sussed the quirks and delicacies of the writer's beautiful hand. That small pleasures can be a warm hand that reaches out to you ... or a solitary walk in the forest waiting to be reunited with the one you love, or best of all ... to receive a few handwritten words from you in return ...

Seriously swoon-inducing stuff if I were so inclined ... but, alas, so practical am I that all I could think about was the sheer pleasure this little letter had given me and the least I could do was to write those few handwritten words in return ... so I did. And while the half hour or so that I struggled (surely not struggled!) with working out the letter's meaning gave me such exquisite pleasure, it seemed a poor exchange to write my card in something so prosaic as English! No doubt there are poets who, writing in English, can induce a swoon or two (and if pressed I could produce a list of them), but I think there's little chance I'm one of them ... so I decided to reply in French ... knowing full well that M. Jean-Pierre (for whom French is a doddle) will no doubt find my French appalling, and perhaps (hopefully?) amusing and endearing ... oh well, no matter, it's the thought in the gift that counts, they say ...