My postcard affinity, like many aspects of the adult I’ve turned out to be, probably started with my maternal grandmother. My grandmother taught me how to eat artichokes, scraping the flesh off each butter-laden leaf with my teeth. My grandmother bought me my first perfume. My grandmother insisted I learn French, as she had, in an aspirational attempt to become the sort of woman who would flee the small town she grew up in.
The small town I grew up in was in Connecticut, while my mother’s parents lived in Los Angeles, 3,000 miles away. We visited them or they visited us several times a year, but Grandma was always looking for new ways to maintain a relationship with me from afar. It was because of my grandmother that I got my first email address, AIM account, and cell phone. My grandparents would buy me stacks of books and assign me book reports upon completion, which I would send back to them for review. My grandmother would tear articles out of the Los Angeles Times and short stories out of The New Yorker and mail them to me, required reading, her blue ink scrawl across the top.
So the postcards began as an assignment. Grandma would leave me with stacks of pre-addressed, pre-stamped cards and encourage me to write to her. I was a dutiful child, and so I’m sure I sent many to her, dispatches from my child’s desk in the Connecticut woods to her sunny California oasis.
In adulthood, I’ve ended up with three remainders, all depicting famous paintings I’ve come to associate with her. I don’t know why these are the three I kept. Did the assignment grow old? Did we move our correspondence to email? Did my child self like these images too much to send them back to her? As an adult, I’ve visited van Gogh’s Arles and Monet’s Giverny. Chris Clayton’s guitar man reminds me of my aunt’s handmade dining room table.
Maturing into a young woman, postcards subsequently became a collection: a low-cost way to take home a piece of art I admired from a museum or gallery show. A better picture of a sunset or a skyline than I could ever capture myself while on vacation. A punny, quirky, or feminist slogan that reflected a little bit of me. I accumulated hundreds of them: some sent to me from friends and family far away, but mostly pieces of paper testifying to my own adventures.
It wasn’t until I studied abroad in Paris, France, my junior year of college—as my grandmother had been encouraging me to do from the time I was 10—that I tapped into the joy of sending other people postcards, not just hoarding them for myself. I met an incredibly adventurous and confident friend in my study abroad program who sent postcards back to the States all the time. She even had friends sending her postcards from their study abroad travels all over the world. Easy as that!
Like many bureaucratic matters in France, of course buying stamps at the post office wasn’t actually as simple as she made it sound. Standing in line behind the many furious and frustrated French people trying to locate their packages, make a deposit at the bank, or figure out which line they were supposed to be standing in, I would rehearse my request for postcard stamps. « Je voudrais un carnet de timbres internationales, s’il vous plaît. » Inevitably, the rs would get all gummed up in my throat when I finally got to the counter, or I would be so nervous that my voice barely emerged above a whisper, but I would always leave with my packet of colorful stamps, the kind you had to lick to affix to your postcards, tucked in my wallet.
My grandmother died the summer after I graduated from college. We hadn’t spoken in seven months. Perhaps these last three postcards hold all that was left unsaid over the 21 years of our relationship. All the ways we were similar, and all the ways we’re very, very different. A postcard-sized dose of gratitude and hurt. Or maybe my very first lesson in drawing a boundary, keeping something just for myself.
