Day Thirty-Six

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The pallet of cartons with highlighter-yellow "fragile, do not drop" labels was picked up. Now the area the pallet used to sit for the past few days looks empty. I hope it gets there safely. I hope I gave them all required paperwork. When I discovered the postal service the first time when I was four or five I was amazed by the system where you give someone you have never met and don't know anything about an item to be delivered to another person. I was also so skeptical that I needed to test it by sending a postcard addressed to where I lived, to my mother. I do not remember if it was the next day or a few days later but surely the postcard written by me arrived to my parents' mail box. Then I felt guilty for both doubting the postal person and wasting the potage money and ended up having trouble sleeping for the next few days. 

Once I sent a box of my personal belongings from Philadelphia to my parents' home in Japan, where I was going back to. It was the end of my two-and-a-half months stay and moving away from my closest friends made me too sad for doing something so practical like packing.  I did not have much positive thoughts in my future life in Japan and I just emotionally and carelessly shoved things in to a box the night before I left to the airport. It was an inappropriate large box of approximately 30" cube, with no packaging materials so the contents moved around. A few months later a sad looking cardboard object arrived with straps that someone must have applied, somehow holding jammed corners and broken folds together. To my much amazement It arrived across the Pacific Ocean without any damage to the contents..

A few years ago I traveled to Galapagos Islands. On one of the islands was a hundreds years old whaler's "post office" now a popular place for a tourist to visit.  It was started back in the day where whalers would leave letters to their friends and families back home and the next travelers would look through and deliver letters addressed to near their next destination. It is  a postal system run by strangers. Like other tourists I put a few postcards in the mail box, one of. which was address to my parents in Japan. A few weeks later my mother told  me on the phone that she had a strange unexpected visitor; a tall blonde woman showed up at her door and told her "tegami motte kita" (I brought a letter). My parents live in a small beach/fishing town 60 km south of Tokyo. I didn't even imagine that my postcard would get there. 

I hope the shipment gets to the destination intact without getting lost in the sea called a warehouse.