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After losing his corporate marketing job during the pandemic, Stephen Starring Grant decided to move back home and become a rural mail-carrier associate in Blacksburg, Virginia. His recently published memoir unravels what he learned about Appalachian identity and blue-collar experiences, but also about the power of showing up, every single day. “In Grant’s telling, postal workers bring order and predictability to a country that can feel like it’s unraveling, especially during crises that starkly illustrate how reliant we are on the federal bureaucracy,” Tyler Austin Harper writes in a review of the memoir.
Today’s newsletter looks at how mail carriers do their jobs—even in the most remote parts of the country—and why their work matters.
On Mail Delivery
Memoir of a Mailman
By Tyler Austin Harper
A new book describes the challenges and joys of life as a letter carrier.
How the Most Remote Community in America Gets Its Mail
By Sarah Yager
Transporting letters and packages to the village of Supai requires a feat of logistics, horsemanship, and carefully placed hooves.
The Quiet Heroism of Mail Delivery
By Mara Wilson
After a natural disaster, courier services such as USPS and UPS help communities return to a sense of normalcy. (From 2019)
Still Curious?
When you give a tree an email address: The city of Melbourne assigned trees email addresses so citizens could report problems such as dangerous branches. Instead, people wrote thousands of love letters to their favorite trees, Adrienne LaFrance wrote in 2015.
The endangered art of letter writing: In 1981, Belinda struck up a conversation with a stranger on a ferry. Nearly 40 years later, she and that stranger, Julie, still write each other physical letters multiple times a year.
Other Diversions
P.S.
I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “On a rare sunny day during this season’s rainy May and June, I picked up a red rose that had been dropped on the sidewalk,” Jane Stahl, 78, from Boyertown, Pennsylvania, writes. “I enjoyed this single bloom on my kitchen windowsill, reminding me that sometimes it's the little things that provide joy on cloudy days, beauties that inspire us to look for more of them in our travels. And, indeed, that's what happened. During the rest of my walk that morning, I saw roses everywhere and ‘brought them home’ via my phone’s camera to share with friends and remind me to look for those little things.”
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
— Isabel
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