It was addressed by hand. The personal letter inside was sealed by hand — by my mother, by me, or by our family — in wax, before it left.
You bring it in. You set it on the kitchen counter. You let it sit there, sometimes for hours, because you already know what's inside is the kind of thing you want to be ready for. When you open it, you do it with your cup of tea. Or your glass of wine. The way one Keeper put it: I took it to my chair by the window. I didn't open my phone once.
And here's the part that surprised me when it started happening: while you're sitting there, somewhere in another state, in another kitchen, a man you don't know yet is reading the same chapters. So is a woman, on the other coast, in her own chair by her own window. None of you are together. All of you are.
We created something for you and the others, called the Reading Room. You can get there without traveling. You can talk about the chapters together, or just watch and listen, or skip it entirely and just receive the parcel. However you want it. Either way, you're together.
That's what the parcel does.
That's what twelve dollars a month is for.
I'm Jules. My mother and I are the ones making it. Once a month, from her kitchen table to mine, Maine to Massachusetts, a parcel goes out to places all across the country.
Inside are surprises — tea, recipes, deeply personal letters, and more, along with the next chapters of a novel still being written, written by a mother and daughter, shaped by the people who read it.
This is a video of when Jules called Nini to tell her about the idea for the Jules & Nini project. Nini, naturally, had questions.
Every darn paragraph pulled me in with the descriptive writing. I felt as if I was right there with you.
— Joyce, after receiving Month One
We started doing this for a specific reason. There was a drive my mother and I took, after my dad passed away, and my Mom got me a speeding ticket. Something happened on that drive that's hard to explain in a paragraph. So I wrote a letter about it. It's two pages.
It says everything.
Still thinking about it?
No rush. We'll send you a letter — a real one, by mail — so you can hold it before deciding.
We've been talking about doing this for 2 years. The contents of the Parcels are fun to imagine and put together. We've been hearing great things from the Keeper's about them. The story? — it's fiction, though you'd be surprised how much of it is true. Written for the people who are ready to slow down long enough to let a story find them.
If that's you — or someone you know — we'd love to have you along.
With love,
Jules & Nini
P.S. Know a mother and daughter who'd love this? Tell them. The best things still travel by word of mouth.