The family member who sends ordinary news helps distance remain populated.

Long-distance relationships survive on small traffic rather than on updates. The relative who sends a photograph of the garden, a note about a neighbour, a complaint about the bins is keeping a place alive in your head where people are still doing things. Without that, distance empties out and the family becomes a set of headlines: births, illnesses, funerals. Ordinary news is what makes the gaps between headlines feel inhabited.

Send something unremarkable to someone far away this week. What the weather did, what you ate, what the street looks like now: none of it needs to be worth reporting to be worth sending.