Mr. Gaertner, reading your essays takes me back to childhood and the age of correspondence.

Someone would get a letter in the mail, and we'd all gather around to hear it read out loud. Just like your essays, we heard first hand news from the farm in Vermont, downtown Chicago, New York, Norway, Russia, and everywhere else where people we knew travelled or lived. And then we'd write our news and send our letter in the opposite direction. Oh what joy digital cameras would have been.