Returning

I love to get mail. As a child I ran to the mailbox to see if I had anything -- fortunately I had godparents and penpals who indulged me, or at least occasionally sent me something so that I could bounce back up the driveway. Returning from a week away from the office meant returning to a very full mailbox -- not to the point where my mail had been shifted to an actual box on the counter, but I did have to compress it in order to get it out of the slot.

Much of it went straight to the recycling bin, but even this brings me a little bit of joy, though I hate the concept of junk mail and how it offends the environment -- both the ecological and the aesthetic as it wastes away in piles upon my desk. But there were little delights -- thank you notes, handwritten correspondence, invitations to continuing education events, magazines to look forward to reading, etc. I have done my initial sort -- recycle, read later, read now, and file in my "someone loves me" folder.

This return to my office is also marked with a sense of satisfaction, as I remembered before I left, to wash those nasty, nasty coffee cups that had already started sprouting when I washed them. I'm afraid that my office would have needed some serious decontamination if I hadn't washed them, but there they sit -- gleaming and clean, just waiting for fresh hot coffee.

Perhaps I'll make coffee and read my mail. My work days this week are more contained this week as we're juggling daycare being closed, and my thought is that I'll be more productive. So far that's not the case.