Don't Forget to Send a Postcard!

Dear Readers,

As the end of summer draws closer, friends and family have been sharing photos and stories from sun-filled summer vacations around New England and across the States. According to Facebook and Instagram, some were even lucky enough to visit far-flung foreign lands.

These days vacation memories are shared on social media, but I miss when the mail carrier brought me postcards. In my childhood, sending them was de rigueur when you went away. People would say, “Don’t forget to send a postcard!” And you actually sent them one.

I still have postcards that my father sent home to his family from the South Pacific where he flew planes in the Army Air Corps in World War II. In my twenties, I went to Japan in search of the father who I barely knew before he died. He wasn’t terribly communicative with me, which is one of the reasons I love the letters and postcards he used to send, both to me and to his family long before I was born. As a treasure hunter, I read them for clues to who my father was.

Ahh, postcards.

I have hundreds of them that people have sent me, and I have just as many that are unwritten. For years whenever I traveled, I collected them as souvenirs. I also have postcards from friends’ art openings, beaches that I went to as a teenager, restaurants, and everywhere that sold or just gave them away. I have black and white postcards from prominent buildings in my hometown of New Britain, CT, and cheesy joke postcards bought for 5 cents at Liggett’s Drugstore 40 years ago. Each offers a unique public snapshot of a moment in time.

My sister Betsy traveled to Strasbourg France last week for her family’s end of the summer vacation. My paternal grandfather was born in Strasbourg when it was still part of Germany, and, thinking about her trip, I went to my box of memorabilia and pulled out this postcard that my grandparents sent to my father and his siblings in 1931 when they returned to Strasbourg for a visit. Talk about cherished ephemera.

Taking out my postcards today reminded me of how the mailbox used to be filled with them this time of year. Sometimes the writing would be small and cramped and full of details. Or it might say nothing more than, “The weather is here. Wish you were wonderful!” I still send postcards sometimes. Not like in my childhood, but every so often, I’ll dart one off to a friend, sometimes making my own from a cardboard cereal box or with a goofy photograph that I come across. You can put an address and stamp on almost any stiff piece of paper and it will be delivered.

My postcards tell the stories of my travels and my friendships for the first four decades of my life. In my upcoming memoir, Trove, A Woman’s Search for Truth and Buried Treasure, I could just about illustrate every page with a postcard from my collection. I have so many from the places I went in search of love and truth and treasure. And now they are like treasure themselves.

In exactly one month, on 9-19-19, my book will be released with Brown Paper Press, and, truthfully, I’ve been a bit of a wreck preparing for the launch and several upcoming events.

But then I take a day like today to read and look at decades worth of postcards, and I slow down and remember that we’re all just people trying to connect however we can. What we used to accomplish with postcards and stamps and hours of writing out addresses, we now do with emails and social media posts and a quick press of a button. I’m not getting all nostalgic for the olden days, but I do love a hold-in-your-hand postcard with a friend’s handwriting, margin notes, doodles and jottings.

So for those who pre-order Trove before it’s released, I’d love to send you a postcard.

If you pre-order in the next month, shoot me an email to Sandra@SandraAMiller.com or leave a note below with your snail mail address. I will hand-select a postcard that somehow connects to a place in my book and mail it to you with a personal message on it. Some postcards may even have clues on them. (More about that in my next post coming in two weeks.)

Thanks for reading. Thanks for loving postcards, too. I can’t wait to send you one!

XO Sandy