129twigandvine

My daughter and I play a game as we drive home from school and approach our driveway. Will it be a good day or a bad day at the mailbox? She jumps out of the car to gather the mail and then report her findings.

A friend recently lamented that the US postal service is so in trouble and that Saturday delivery will soon be suspended. She expounded on the joys of finding a real letter in the mailbox, with a licked stamp, handwritten address and a card or letter inside. And if we all started writing these letters to our friends and loved ones we could save the mail service.

I’m so on board. Are you? I love real mail!!!

But I disgress from where I was going with the first sentence…

So last week when I found this new Carré Blanc mailer among the bills and Kmart fliers I swooned. I know it wasn’t the handwritten address type of mail, but it was pure eye candy, so that qualifies as nearly-as-good.

The paper it’s printed on is enough to make me happy—all creamy and heavy with a matte finish that makes the photographs look so, so, deep and lustrous you almost feel you could dip a toe in and find yourself sucked into the scene, lying on that soft bed by the crackling fire in the fireplace.

Carré Blanc does color beautifully, but they perfect monochrome palettes like no one else. I appreciate this because I’m not so good at calm white and gray rooms, though I wish I were.

There is a Carré Blanc shop on Rue St-Denis in Montréal, and I have often wandered in there eyeballing all the Parisian designs with a crazed look in my eye that probably makes the sales clerks nervous. It’s just all so beautiful that I have a fairly strong reaction when I go there. And somehow I am now on their mailing list (joy!), so I can keep the crazed looks to myself in the privacy of my own home.

‘nough said.

I’m going to find a stamp and an envelope and write an overdue letter to a friend or two.

If you care to comment, I’ll send you a card. Will you send me one too? Just include an email address so I can get in touch with you to exchange postal addresses. Together we can save the post office (or if not, we can at least have a Good Mail Day to anticipate).