{"id":2276,"date":"2012-02-08T09:07:26","date_gmt":"2012-02-08T14:07:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=2276"},"modified":"2012-07-15T20:11:06","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T00:11:06","slug":"letters-cast-away-by-melissa-r-mendelson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/letters-cast-away-by-melissa-r-mendelson\/","title":{"rendered":"Letters Cast Away by Melissa R. Mendelson"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The promise of February was the soft green below my feet.\u00a0 Cool cement kissed my bottom, and hands fell through air.\u00a0 Eyes were the sands of time glistening in the brilliant sun, and winter was a second thought.\u00a0 Spring was here now, but what would that make the summer?\u00a0 Would it be scorching hot, and as thoughts sifted together gently like a subtle breeze, I waited for the mail truck to pull up on the side of the road and leave me letters to find, more likely bills, or long awaited contest entries, but what if my mailbox remained empty?\u00a0 And what if the mail truck became a barren, white shell forever out of gas?<\/p>\n

A simple piece of paper.\u00a0 It is the connection to this world.\u00a0 No matter how heavy its black ink words are, we hold it tight in our hand, connected beyond our glass door, and we respond, slipping a return envelope into the blue, metal mailbox that stands proud outside the post office doors.\u00a0 We wait, we connect, and we expect that mail truck every day to pull up on the side of the road and leave us letters to find.\u00a0 But what if that day has come, where all mailboxes around the world are pulled down by the weight of technology, buried under digital?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m addicted.\u00a0 I must check my email, at least once, no twice a day.\u00a0 I pay more bills online than through snail mail.\u00a0 I\u2019m a Twitteree, Facebook fan, and Linkedin profiler, and all those writing contest entries have become digital, paid through PayPal.\u00a0 With a snap of my fingers, a flex of my wrist, I connect and submit and reach out to a world inches from my fingertips, so why do we need the postal system?\u00a0 Like the dinosaurs and the days of vinyl, maybe their time has come, but can we truly trust the internet to forever connect us to the world?\u00a0 Or would the plug one day be pulled?<\/p>\n

Solar flares are launching.\u00a0 Winters are melting.\u00a0 This is no January or February.\u00a0 Where are the days of ice and snow, tires weaving in and out of wretched roads?\u00a0 Where are the snow angels and their snow men?\u00a0 The satellites are spinning, and cell service is echoing.\u00a0 But what if it takes one giant flare to turn the lights out?\u00a0 Would the world still be there?<\/p>\n

Or would I be sitting on this porch, waiting endlessly to connect to what was once there?\u00a0 No more postal service.\u00a0 No more letters.\u00a0 No more white mail trucks zooming up and down carrying packages of love and kisses and the weight of this world.\u00a0 No internet service to kill the deafening silence of a thousand mailboxes forever left vacant along the side of this road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The promise of February was the soft green below my feet.\u00a0 Cool cement kissed my bottom, and hands fell through air.\u00a0 Eyes were the sands of time glistening in the brilliant sun, and winter was a second thought.\u00a0 Spring was here now, but what would that make the summer?\u00a0 Would it be scorching hot, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,200,219],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2276"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3210,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276\/revisions\/3210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}