Night Mail

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You want to hear a story? Oh good.

So, the husband and I attended a university where guys and girls still live in separate dorms across campus from each other. You can call it old-fashioned but having separate dorms led to something rather adorable in my book: Night Mail. You see, the guys and girls each had a wooden box rigged up on wheels with a rope on the front to pull it around. In these boxes the students would leave letters and packages addressed to each other and at night, after we were all back in our rooms for curfew, a couple of guys or girls (depending on who’s turn it was) would grab the wooden box and roll it across campus through the dark laughing and giggling about all the love letters and cologne drenched envelopes being sent from one heart to another. Once to the other side of campus, the boxes were exchanged and the letters dropped off in stacks at each of the dormitories. Then a couple more students would take the stacks of letters and slide them under Romeo or Juliet’s door. It was a hoot…and quite romantic, really. I remember how exciting it was when a letter with my name came sliding under the door. I would snatch it up, hop in bed, and pour over the words of the man who would later become my husband. Darren and I now have boxes of letters from our dating days. So much of our relationship is scripted out in the words we wrote back and forth as we came to know and love each other. Darren the artist filled his letters with drawings and illustrations that still make me smile when I come across them. My favorite picture he drew was of me calling him:

The little guy jumping in the air–gets me every time :]

Between night mail and all the time we spent living across the country from each other, written letters became a staple in our relationship–and we still write each other letters today. Sometimes old fashion is the best fashion of all, kids ;]

26 thoughts on “Night Mail”

  5. My husband’s love language is Words of Encouragement, so I often leave him little notes or buy him cards just because. I also write him encouraging emails that I know he will read during the day at work.

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  7. I work with elderly people, one of my clients who was 100 years old once showed me a yellowed, crumbling letter a guy in the train had given to her over 80 years prior. Similar story to what you read in the free papers that litter today’s trains; he had caught the train and shared the same carriage with a lady who had caught his eye every day and finally worked up the carriage to drop it into her lap. 80 years on, she kept this letter which reminded her of the 65 happy years of marriage she had shared with the very same man.

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  9. Now that I think about it. I don’t think I have received a love letter from anyone in the last five years. That is sad. A couple of emails, but that is not the same.
    I found letters that my parent wrote to each other when my dad was in the military and I can read them over an over again and they make me smile. What a great way for you and your husband to continue to connect.

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