My Post Office Box Number 2 (P.O. Box 2, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816) is just a few weeks old, but it is already yielding much treasure, bringing me back into the nearly lost world of letter writing and also of the time when messages were considered, and took some time to compose, send and receive and absorb. I remember when letters were a treasure, I am surprised and delighted to have them back in my life, I love my Post Office Box 2, I visit it every day and there is always something wonderful waiting for me – not a text, not a notification, not a “like,” but a letter, sometimes written, sometimes typed, signed and surprising, intimate and affirming.

Somehow getting letters in my Post Office Box affirms my identity, confirms who I am. It means something to send a letter, it means something to get one. I don’t know how long there will be Post Office Boxes, I will cherish them for as long as they exist.

Saturday, I went to the Post Office unlocked my box – it is right  by the door – and there was one letter stuffed into a pile of junk mail (we use that for starting our fires, it burns quickly and well). I went home, sat in the Adirondack Chair, leaned back and opened my letter, I might need to get a letter opener, I am using my farm knife.

It was like reading a good novel, I was caught by the first line and pulled in. It had been a difficult day, I was discouraged. I ended up tearing up, nearly crying, this message from Post Office Box Number 2 brought me back into life:

“You crossed my life trajectory in a mysterious manner, ” wrote Judy from a small town in Wisconsin. “I am a 74year old, crusty, sometimes ornery, often solitary RN, struggling with life issues, and one November day, when walking my border collie Rosey, on the isolated windswept bluffs overlooking Lake Michigan, a grizzled looking character pulled up next to me on the road in a beat-up old station wagon, and I thought – Oh, Oh, Mr. Masher!”

“He asked, “is that a border collie?”. I responded “yes.” He shouted “read Jon Katz!” and drove off, Judy said, she put it out of her mind. A year later, she wrote, she was in a Borders bookstore killing time and she was some books on the sale table with my name on them. She picked up Running To The Mountain.

“Since then,” Judy wrote, “you have been a daily part of my life with the blog. Have purchased all your books and after reading them multiple times, donated them all to the (local) public library so others can spread the gospel of authenticity, honor, human suffering and renewal, the dignity of suffering and inevitability of death with peace and acceptance. You have helped me through tough decision-making, bleak mornings alone, successful days when I truly made a difference with my patients, and the decision to revisit an old love to see if renewal is a possibility. Things don’t change but WE Do!.”

She closed the latter with a note to the man who yelled my name out of a car window: “..grizzled master out there, wherever you are, keep on spreading the word!”

I folded up the letter – which included a wintry glossy of Rosey on a path much like the one at Bedlam Farm and put it on my desk. I will have to find a safe place for these letters, I have not gotten one in a long time.  I had been through a rough morning, the Anxious World was bearing down on me,  I was struggling with tech support, online banking, lost passwords, I was discouraged at the new reality of publishing, when my books sell for $1.99 and still lag behind best-selling stories of wealthy women taking their cute little Shit-zhu’s  to Paris. I was thinking, my stories will just never be cute enough to matter in the world, the world has changed.

But when I read Judy’s letter and I was reminded that I do make a difference, and my stories do matter, and things do not change but I do. I work every day to become more authentic, to live honorably, to understand the dignity of suffering and the inevitability of death. I work every day to accept my life, and to love it, and to never speak ill of it. And I know, as I hope Judy now knows, that love and renewal is always a possibility, at any age.

So thank you, Judy, I doubt I would ever have seen this message or that you would ever have sent it without my Post Office Box Number. It is a treasure, a reminder to me that considered words do matter in the world, and that life is filled with magic.

This is the beginning of a new column – “Letters From Post Office Box Number Two.” It will be about the power of the considered word, the re-affirmation of self in the era of the text message.