The Minnesota Farm Woman

I have reached a certain age where I’ve seen a lot of changes in the way we get mail. No Pony Express jokes, please. I grew up in town where it was a daily event to walk the two blocks to the post office, turn the dial on Box 42, and walk home with a big handful of mail, unless there were other errands to run, of course. These days, I walk to the end of the driveway and get our mail right out of the box. Usually, though, HE gets the mail and puts it on the table, but might as well toss most of it right in the trash before it even reaches the table. For many years, I would warm up my big PC a couple of times a day and check my email, which would catch me up on what was going on in the world as well as news from friends and relatives. We would share a few jokes, the best of which I would print and pass along at work. These days, my laptop and tablet don’t need any warm up time, and I communicate with my friends and relatives via Facebook. Some days, I even forget to check my email. I signed in this morning to clean out my mailbox and delete most of the 2,864 messages that were there. Sadly, about 2000 of the messages were junk mail…or were they? Maybe I do have a long-lost dead relative in Somalia, and maybe I really will inherit the gazillion dollar estate if I wire $564.32 to the bank account of James Smythe, Esquire. Or maybe not. I’m really not looking for Russian love, thank you very much. I’ll stick with HIM, who doesn’t complain that he has to carry 50 pound bags of chicken feed through the mud when he doesn’t even like chickens. If you ask him and he does complain, I don’t want to know about it. I’m not really interested in the latest sweepstakes, E-Cigarette, or age-defying vitamin discovery, either. I kept my finger on the delete button although I wanted to take a peek at the company that was touting “Cougar singles! Rich women seeking love! Look beyond the Medicare data!” I don’t want to take a cruise, a cheap airline flight, or any other exotic vacation, even if it were to Somalia for genealogical research on rich dead relatives. I must admit that I was slightly tempted at the email from a company that guaranteed (for the low price of $99) that I would never lose my keys again. Yes, I opened that email, which as we all know, means that I will now receive 1000 more emails for similar products. I really did want to know, if for nothing else but curiosity’s sake, how they could promise something like that. I was really disappointed to find that I would have to program my phone to find my lost keys. I lose my phone way more often than I lose my keys, so the amazing key finder would be doomed to fail for sure. As soon as I deleted most of the emails, I got one that told me I really needed phytoceramides and if I ordered them right away, I could get free shipping. I wondered what the heck phytoceramides were, and with a quick internet search, I learned they were substances that kept one’s skin moist and plump. Plump? I already have some of that. DELETE!