One Good Small Thing

Take it when you can get it.

Hi friends.

The world is an absolute shitshow right now. This was one good small thing that happened to me, so I thought I’d share it to a wider audience.

I posted this the other night when I had just gotten home from my time away looking after my mother. This was after a friend had picked me up from the airport, another small act of kindness. There was no food in my house, but it was clean, and my dog was happy to see me. I was ravenous. I couldn’t imagine driving to the grocery store after all the travel I had done that day.

So I ordered from a place I had always meant to order from, and which I knew would provide me with comfort. This postcard was in the bottom of the bag. I almost didn’t flip it over—I just thought it was some marketing device automatically included with the order. I’m so glad I did.

I don’t quite know how to explain what an absolute fucking gift this was to get at that moment. When you’re in and out of hospitals and rehab facilities looking after a loved one, the first thing the goes is your sense of self. Banish the ego when you have to care for someone else. It’s as it should be.

But of course we need our ego to walk erect through this world. And to make art. I’m always struggling with how much of it to let in or out of my writing. I had abandoned it for a week though. I couldn’t quite remember who I was. This note reminded me I existed and I wrote things. I was so grateful for it.

I love to send a thank you card or a note of appreciation of friendship. I love to pick out the right card. I love to express a deep feeling in handwriting. It’s so easy to dash something off online, where many of us spend so much of our time communicating these days. It makes it easier, perhaps, to not think things through. Taking the time to handwrite a message is a small but significant act.

Let us never forget what our handwriting looks like.

Peace,

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.