Day Fourteen - Junk Mail

Today I'm Grateful for:-

Today I'm grateful for junk mail.

Yes, yes, I know, I am coming up with some weird stuff to be grateful for, but today it seems relevant somehow.
After being housebound for a couple of days, I was eager to get a hold of the latest Innovations catalogue that was delivered to my home.

As a woman, I am supposed to love the whole shopping till I drop type of thing, but to be honest, I really don't like shopping - except Christmas shopping for my family and friends - I don't like the crowds, the bad smells, or the fact that I hurt all over when I'm barely even done. Clothes shopping is a nightmare, and grocery shopping is just a necessary evil.

So anyway, I like to take five minutes and browse through catalogues, sometimes ordering things and sometimes even getting what I order without them screwing it up. 

My point today is that as I was going through the catalogue, I was thinking to myself "wow, who the heck would buy a dress that ugly?" and I laughed. Giggled in fact. The clothes were, what my fashion savvy daughters would call, hideous sacks. And then I stopped to think, yes, I know, hard to imagine...but think I did, who would buy these clothes? People who couldn't get out and about to find clothes in 'normal' shops, people who were either too embarrassed, too busy, the elderly, the infirm. When you think about it, there are a lot of people out there who simply can't get to the shops to buy a new outfit or something for their homes. How do they cope? Just how many of these isolated people are out there? People who either don't know how or are too proud to ask for help. It is an interesting question and a disquieting one. It made me look at those "hideous sacks" in a whole new light. What if I was housebound permanently? Would I too just check out the catalogues and choose a dress based only on comfort and whether it had a pretty print? Probably.

So my point is, the catalogues may just be a nuisance to some, a waste of paper to others, a source of an enjoyable five minutes to me, but to some people, it may be the difference between sitting home alone, or sitting home alone in a pretty print dress. Wait, that's not what I wanted to say...really, it's not. What I wanted to say was that maybe the catalogues aren't just a nuisance, maybe they serve a purpose deeper than what the general public sees... maybe they are a link to the community for some, a way of finding ways to beautify their homes,  tools for the garden  and innovative equipment for use by the disabled, not to mention those print dresses.

I think I will put a sign on my letter box... "junk mail welcomed here, and thanks".

Kisses

Julie