chloejoanne

I live on an "urban farm" in a mid-size city in the US midwest. I work as an editor and writer. In my free time I take care of a standard poodle, two cats, three french angora rabbits, and four aging chickens. We have honeybees too. I also like bicycling, walking, reading, doodling with gel pens, playing the piano, and having adventures with my unusual family, which includes my partner (who is an artist and therapist) and a teenager who lives with us part-time.

I grew up before personal computers or email or Internet (in the 1960s and 1970s), so I learned to write "real letters" when I was very young. I found my first penpal at age 8 -- another girl I met when my family was camping. She and I wrote to each other for several years. I also wrote thank you letters to my grandparents for money they sent for holidays. As I got a little older and started going to summer camp, my correspondence grew. I wrote many letters during each school year to my campmates and counselors from the summer before. I lived for the mail to arrive! In those days (late 1960s), making a long-distance telephone call was very expensive, so what we now call snail-mail was the best way to connect.

I continued to be an avid letter-writer into adulthood, although phone calls, then email, and then Facebook began to take over. Even my mother used email, until she was in her late 80s! But she always preferred "real" letters, and I tried to keep sending them.

After my mother developed dementia, she totally forgot about computers, but she still loved to get mail -- especially letters from me. I wrote as often as I could in her last years (she died at age 91 in 2012), often just a short note on a postcard. She treasured those postcards! I made small albums of the postcards for her and she would flip through them and comment on the pictures, which were usually nature scenes or amusing pictures of animals.

My father lived until age 95 in 2014. He had very advanced dementia and did not talk much in his last years, but he seemed to enjoy receiving postcards from me.

My favorite correspondence right now is with my 96-year-old uncle in Kansas. Last year I sent him the "carrier pigeon" that the Letter Writers Alliance sells (see www.16sparrows.com). He was delighted, and he mailed it to one of my cousins in Marlyand, who gave it to one of his sisters in Pennsylvania, and she mailed it to another sister in Connecticut.

I'm happy to receive any postcard. I'm very fond of the work of Inge Löök in Finland; I sometimes send them to postcrossing pals and would also love to receive them. I also enjoy making my own postcards. I love to draw doodles of rabbits!