A Letter From Uganda

I was walking through St. John's Wood a couple of weeks ago when I passed this derelict phone booth with a freaky baby doll's face peering out. I think it's a sticker on the inside of the glass. Bizarre!

Amazingly, all my seedlings -- except for the zinnia I lost to the slug the first night after I planted them out -- seem to be surviving. They're still tiny and not growing much. I think the weather is just too cool. Today is supposed to be beautiful, but rain is forecast for the weekend (please God) and we're getting another chilly spell next week, with highs in the mid-50s F. So they may be sulking for a while.

All but one of the dahlias have sprouted and they're looking good so far, at least.

Rescued plant report: The leaves have fallen off the fiddle-leaf fig and the green sprout has turned brown. It's not looking good. The leaves have also fallen off the tall stalk of the rubber tree, though they're still hanging onto the short branch. I'm thinking the tall stalk may have to come off but the short branch will survive. We shall see.

Here's a weird mystery that came in the mail last week. (The envelope includes our full address, but I've digitally erased it for blog privacy purposes.)

What would you do if you got a letter like this? It's from Uganda, addressed to someone I do not know, but at our correct address. There's no return address, so I couldn't just return it to the sender. I could give it back to the post office but they wouldn't know what to do with it either. It would just go to a dead-letter office, if those even exist anymore.

I decided to try to find the woman to whom it was addressed. I thought she might be a neighbor, so I began by Googling her, as one does. Turns out she was an author and fairly well-known vocal instructor. She even has a Wikipedia page! She was American but she lived in London in the 1980s and '90s, and perhaps she lived in our flat. I have no idea. But she died in California in 2019.

So now I have a letter with no return address, sent to a dead woman. At this point, I decided to open it. Perhaps there would be an address inside that I could respond to, just to let the sender know that their letter didn't reach its intended recipient.

Turns out it's a request for money from a young woman in Uganda who's trying to raise tuition to complete a college degree. I'm not sure why she's writing Ms. Dayme but apparently she does not know her. It's basically a snail-mail equivalent of phishing. If I write her back she's going to put the squeeze on me for money, so I've decided not to respond. It sounds rude but I think that's the way it has to be.

Isn't that strange? Cool stamps, though. I'll save the envelope.