12-YEAR OLD MAILS LETTER IN ANALOG COMMS REVIVAL

Nostaliga 

Bucks County, Pennsylvania – Cora Barnes, a twelve-year-old resident of Quakertown, Pennsylvania, revived an ancient tradition long departed in the United States and around the world, when she mailed a letter to her former classmate and friend, Lucinda Briggs who had recently relocated to California with her family. Now settled in San FranCisco Systems City, it was there that she received Barnes’ letter, the first to be mailed in over seventy-five-years, the United States Postal Service told The Oracle.

Barnes is presently studying the history of the development of time travel technologies in the late twenty-first-century in her U.S. history class, when she read about the concept of a ‘penpal’ in “The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” a book that she found in her attic and had belonged to her great-great-grandmother. “It occurred to me that letter writing is a form of time travel, too,” Barnes says. 

She and her mother purchased a stamp on Weibay, and drove 300 miles to one of the last remaining mailboxes in the United States, hours from the family’s home in Pennsylvania. The journey reminded Barnes of something else she encountered in her grandmother’s book collection: a road trip. “It made me realize that time travel of the mind is just as powerful as time travel of the body,” Barnes says about the entire experience.

What did she write in her letter to Briggs? “Oh, friend things,” Briggs says coyly, “what’s actually kind of fun is that letters are really secret.” The girls recently reunited for a playdate in which Barnes travelled by hyperloop to visit Briggs in her new house. The girls played with dolls. “It was fun to see her but we decided it was more fun to write letters, but, like a different kind of fun,” Barnes and Briggs agreed.