The front door of the house opens, in a very Dutch way, right onto a staircase. So the only path is up the stairs, into a small hallway and kitchen. The kitchen is where the mail is stored for extended periods of time. Mail addressed to tenants gets picked up quick, but mail to former tenants may be there for months, until they come to get it or the landlord picks it up. But before it lands on the kitchen table, it takes a human to bring it up the stairs. It arrives everyday through the medieval crack, of course.

I get very little mail. Mail is pretty antiquated now. It’s all online communications (or cell phone if you must). So I’m getting less mail now than I did a few years ago. Mail isn’t exciting either, and it has to do with the content of it. Most of the mail is ads that noone cares about, that goes right in the trash. Sometimes we get ads in a proper envelope, addressed to “the inhabitants of this house”, also right in the trash. Very high noise to signal ratio, it’s like email really.

So that’s the reality of the mail. Mail on the kitchen table has no appeal, I go through it dutifully but there’s almost never anything. But when the mail arrives through the crack in the door, it’s downstairs so I don’t see exactly what it is. In between the ads, sometimes there are envelopes. There is a strange sense of suspense there. Since I don’t know I’m almost thinking “hey maybe there’s something down there for me”. Sometimes I go down the stairs to bring it up, sometimes I don’t. It’s always a call to make. If it’s just ads, I never bother.