“Post-it Notes are a great invention: those wonderful little sticky-at-the-top sheets that people use to flag important spots in documents, hang on the edge of file cabinets, and record phone messages at home and at work. The beauty of Post-it Notes for keeping in touch is first, they are tiny, so you do not have to write a lot, and second, you can stick them anywhere, so they are fun to hide. Thanks to Post-its, the art of small greetings is no longer relegated to lunchboxes. Now you can stick a note on the steering wheel of your wife’s car or right on the dashboard of your son’s truck. You can stick one to the side of your roommate’s shoe, or slap it on the bedpost while your daughter is sleeping.
Think of the routine of the person you want to surprise with a note, and plan your attack to coordinate with some action he or she will be doing at the time you want your message to hit. If you want a member of your household to find a morning message, plant it in the coffeepot or a favourite mug, inside the medicine cabinet next to the toothpaste, stuck to the side of the shaving-cream can. One time I boarded a bus two stops before my friend’s daily entry point, gave a note for him to the bus driver to deliver, and got off at the next stop, one before my friend boarded. This was an elaborate effort for a special occasion, but it shows the possibilities when you put your mind to it.
If you want them to find the note during the day, hide a message of cheer inside a schoolbook on the pages of last night’s assignment, or put several inside your husband’s or wife’s attaché case. If you are the one in charge of making the beds that morning, put a Post-it Note where your spouse or your children will find it that night, or roll it up inside their pyjamas.
People often put Post-it Notes on the refrigerator; why not stick some inside as well? For example, warnings: Who touches a slice of this cinnamon bread – Dies like a dog. March on! (he said). Or diet aphorisms: Nothing tastes as good as thin feels. Or love notes: Drink plenty of milk. I love you.
You can hide notes on desktop calendars, putting them where they will be found a week or a month from when you wrote them, perhaps on an anniversary or birthday. On a rainy day put a surprise note in a furled umbrella; when the umbrella is opened against the elements, out floats a love note from you. It makes me smile just to think of it.
When you start hiding notes, you never know where it will lead. Once I had a typist who typed in buried notes to me, right in the middle of the chapter, praising a passage she liked or a phrase that caught her fancy. I did not know until I started to edit the printout that there were messages of support buried there.
— Klauser, H. Put Your Heart on Paper: Staying Connected in a Loose-Ends World (1995) Bantam
