Some links in this piece are affiliate links. If you buy something through one, Little Home Details may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. It never changes what ends up in the drawer. How this works.
The box is an old shoe box, the cardboard gone soft at the corners, and inside it are maybe sixty postcards sent to me over about fifteen years. Some are from my mother on trips she took without me. A few are from a college roommate who wrote in block capitals no matter what she was writing about. Most, though, are from people whose names I recognize but whose faces have gone fuzzy, people I met once at a conference or a wedding and who, for whatever reason, thought to send a postcard back.
I do not know why I kept them all. Some are genuinely beautiful, images of coastlines or old buildings I would frame if I had the wall space. Others are just a plain photograph of a diner or a highway sign, the kind you buy because it was the only postcard left at a gas station and you had already promised someone you would write.
The handwriting says more than the words
What strikes me now, going through the box on a slow afternoon, is how little the actual writing matters compared to the handwriting itself. Most postcards say some version of the same three things: the weather, what they ate, that they wish I were there. But one woman I met exactly once, at a friend’s birthday dinner, wrote in a hand so small and careful it looked almost typed, and I remember nothing about her except that dinner and now this handwriting, which somehow tells me more about her patience than the sentence itself does.
My mother’s postcards are the opposite. Loose, slanted, sometimes trailing off the edge of the card so a word gets cut in half and continues on the back, next to the address, out of order. I can tell which trips she was excited about because the handwriting gets bigger and messier, less concerned with staying inside any lines.
A postcard is one of the few pieces of paper left that assumes the person reading it already knows your voice.
Sorting them without really sorting them
I tried once to put them in chronological order using the postmarks, most of which are faded past reading anyway. I gave up about a third of the way through and just let them fall back into whatever order the box wanted. Now when I go through them it is less like reading a timeline and more like drawing from a hat. I never know if I will land on a stranger’s careful cursive or my roommate’s block capitals describing a meal she had in a city I have never been to.
A few have water damage, the ink bled into soft blue clouds around certain words, from a basement flood years ago in a different apartment. I could have thrown those away. The message on one is almost unreadable now except for the word remember, which sits alone in a patch of unblurred ink like it survived on purpose. I do not know what it was supposed to be remembering. I kept it anyway.
The ones I cannot place
There are four postcards in the box signed only with a first initial, no last name, and I genuinely could not tell you who sent them if my life depended on it. One describes a ferry crossing in enough detail that it must have mattered to the person writing it, the color of the water, a dog on the deck that would not stop barking at gulls. I have turned this postcard over more times than any other in the box, trying to place the initial against every person I might have known around the postmark date, and I have never landed on an answer I trust.
Instead of feeling frustrated by this, I have started to like it. The postcard exists as its own small world now, unattached to a face or a name, just a ferry crossing and a barking dog held in someone’s handwriting. It does not need me to solve it in order to be worth keeping.
I keep the box on the closet shelf above the extra blankets, not somewhere precious, nothing display-worthy about it. Every year or two I take it down on a slow weekend and go through it again, and every time a few cards surprise me, either because I had forgotten they existed or because I notice something in the handwriting I had not noticed before. The box will not get bigger much longer. Most people I know now text instead of writing, myself included, so the postcards I have are close to a finished collection, whatever that collection actually adds up to. I am in no hurry to figure that part out.
