Pen pals

Remember pen pals? When I was a kid, children's magazines like Chickadee sometimes featured a column with names and addresses of youth around the world. Readers could send off a letter and begin a lifetime relationship with another kid in a faraway country...hands across the water stuff. At least that was the theory. Don't think I ever got a single reply.

Enter email, and blogging and facebook and we are just connecting at an alarming rate...

I have been delighted at the responses I've received at my blog gmail, and am enjoying a correspondence with a number of folks - from California, the prairies, the Maritimes, and spots in Ontario, on topics as wide-ranging as dry-stone walls, other writers' architectural projects, Methodist churches and quests for local building and family history.

Just recently a fellow contacted me to correct hazy info I had gleaned from a local history book about the above house, appropriately obfuscated by the hedge beside the property. The detail he provided leaves me in awe of the detective instinct alive in researchers and genealogists.