Life's Simple Wonders
For the month of August, I take a small break and run August Repeats, a repeat of some of the most popular Wonderbringers through the years. Here’s one from July 2025.
Hello Wonderseekers!
I received an email from a reader recently:
Dear Monica,
I had to share the description of a sunset written by my Great Aunt Florence in 1954, setting on the Oregon coast. The sunset description begins at the end of the first page and continues to the second page. The first time I read this description, I stopped in awe.
Thank you for letting me share this with you,
Elaine H., founder of Global Belly Laugh Day, January 24
I was so taken by Great Aunt Florence’s letter and Elaine’s subsequent message, I wanted to share them with you. I love this for a few reasons.
The first is that Great Aunt Flo (I am taking liberties, but I feel she would’ve been Ok with me calling her Flo) has presumably seen this sunset off the grey sand beaches of Twin Rocks, Oregon a multitude of times, and yet, on this day — Christmas Eve 1953 — she was deeply observant enough of this daily banal terrestrial ritual to really see it for all its splendour.
The second thing I love about this is that she was so awed by this sunset, ‘the magnificence of which [she] had not seen before,’ that she felt compelled to write about it to Ruth and Jeb. And that this simple shared observation of an event that occurs every single night (26,122 of them since Flo’s ‘chromo’ beauty) has managed to spread and multiply her wonder across seven decades.
And lastly, I love that this small missive was first handwritten. (Oh, how I do miss handwritten letters. I had two friends in particular who would send me the most gorgeous letters. My friend Kerry had beautiful handwriting and would adorn the outside of the envelope with all manner of small flowers and other doilies, the edges of which would strain from the reams of flowing script and stories it contained within. The other, Rachel, would take the cover of a magazine or perhaps a part of the comics pages from the newspaper, and fold it cleverly into an envelope, which I would open gingerly so as to preserve her humble work of art. I could tell from across the room if it was one of theirs. What joy.) And then it was saved, scanned and sent to me digitally. A gift made possible by the wonders of old and new technology combined.
So many reminders of wonder in such a simple missive. To be present. To slow down. To not only notice, but note the quotidian wonders in our life. And most poignantly, that wonder shared, even across oceans and aeons, is wonder multiplied.
On this first week of July 2025, why don’t you send a handwritten letter to someone sharing a small wonder from your day? Maybe your great-grand niece will come upon it in 2097 and be filled with the same wonder you were today.
Some wonderbringers for me this week:
Why handwritten letters mean so much: A student’s lifelong appreciation for writing and receiving letters exemplifies research on the emotional action of self-disclosure.
How to write letters: A 19th-Century guide to the lost art of epistolary etiquette.
WATCH: And if you aren’t familiar with Letters of Note and their Letters Live events, you will thank me for this reading of a letter by Olivia Coleman (that I was lucky enough to see live).
With wonder,
