Postcards to yourself

Posted by MSW on Jun 16, 2010 in Blog, Random Thoughts & Observations | 2 comments

I was recently admiring a friend’s collection of postcards on his fridge, when he told me that he posted them all to himself.

I’ve always been a big advocate of handwritten letters and postcards as a way of brightening up someone’s day on the other end of the mailbox, but I’ve never thought to send one to myself.

He explained further: Not only do you have a picture of the place you’ve been visiting, a memento in of itself, but that additionally you get the fun of a foreign stamp and a postmark that puts a date to when you were there. More importantly, this memento awaits your arrival home or pleasantly ‘surprises’ you  in your mailbox shortly after your return.

But what do you write?, I asked. He said he describes the scene, his thoughts, his impression at the time. It becomes a moment in time, captured in print. An experience preserved.

What a lovely thought!

(Equally sentimental, he also mentioned he’d regularly send a postcard to his grandmother in Heaven … addressed, well, to Heaven. He laughed when he told me this, “I don’t know where the cards go or what the post office thinks, but I don’t do it for them, I do it for me.”)