A path appears underfoot every year around this time, with a slight softening of the ground and a change in the light. The road is old, but the way is new again.
Spring equinox arrives in just a few days, another moment when day and night stand in perfect balance. Nowruz, one of the world’s oldest celebrations, falls on the equinox itself, marking the moment the earth turns toward renewal. Observed for at least three thousand years across Persia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the diaspora communities that carry it around the world, Nowruz means new day and it begins precisely at the moment of the spring equinox.
Preparations are meticulous. The house is cleaned from top to bottom in a practice called khane-tekani, shaking out the house, to release the accumulated weight of winter. A ceremonial table is set with sprouted wheat for rebirth, vinegar for patience, garlic for health, and a goldfish in a bowl for life against all odds.
In Chinese Lunar New Year, it is the year of the horse. All the teachings of Ramadan have been quietly observed this month. Christians are entering the heart of Lent, when liturgical colors shift from penitential purple to radiant rose, and the invitation is to rejoice. World traditions share this central wisdom. To walk forward, one must first prepare.
This morning my path runs along Sligo Creek near Washington DC, where the trail follows the water through an old urban forest. The snowdrops are done. Small and white and brave, they came and went in February. Crocuses are finishing now, purple and yellow scattered through the leaf litter. Daffodils line the path in both directions to proclaim the news of spring. Soon the cherry blossoms will arrive, carrying the Japanese mono no aware, bittersweet awareness as beautiful things pass.
For the next few weeks I’ll be traveling. Away from my desk and the collection. Being in motion feels at pace with the season. By early April I’ll be back in Arizona, where spring doesn’t linger the way it does in the East. The desert has its own brief, vivid version of the season. Sharp early light and cool mornings, palo verdes going yellow and the brittlebush blazing.
For me, it’s a time to toss off the heavy winter blankets, move furniture, dust out the corners, and feel all the motivations of the season. The Posted Past is making some new moves, too.
Spring greeting cards are full of flowers and fancy, and the messages give us gentle permission to start again. If you are grass-side up, count yourself among the living and the hopeful. Believe that what comes next might be better.
Take a walk this week, if you can. Clear an old task you’ve been putting off. Set the table. Notice what’s arising in your life. Greet the new day.
Romans advised that fortune favors the bold. In Sweden, luck never gives, it only lends. In the United States, the harder you work, the luckier you get. The Arabic proverb says, “Throw a lucky man into the sea and he’ll come up with a fish in his mouth.” A Brit might be lucky at cards, unlucky in love. In Japan, the day you decide to act is your lucky day.
Edwardian postcards had a curious set of symbols to call forth fate and fortune. Horseshoes, shamrocks, roses, and playing cards. Small and slightly worn at the edges, these vintage greeting postcards have traveled more than a century carrying a providential wish.
Only one card in the collection actually says Good Luck. The rest offer best wishes, happy hours, and kind thoughts from me to you. As we’ll see, luck is borne of relationships (and circumstances) lifted by the charitable wish for health, wealth, and wisdom.
Some say that luck can be earned, but only a fool pursues it outright. We daydream about what fortunes may be in store, and sometimes ignore the simple sparkles that appear each day. We know, of course, that there are no free lunches. Yet, we are admonished to never look a gift horse in the mouth.
The bold assume they earned their lucky breaks. The humble suspect they’ve borrowed fortune temporarily. The superstitious are not entirely sure we should discuss it. Luck is where fate and intent find common cause, usually in the context of close friendships.
Old English had no luck. It used wyrd instead, which pointed to fate and destiny. Wyrd is the root of our word weird, which may indicate how people felt about fate. It was uncanny, inevitable, and perhaps divine. You didn’t pursue wyrd. You experienced it through awe and fear.
Somewhere around the 15th century, luk and gelucke drifted in from the Dutch and Low German. Luck was looser and more manual. Like weather, luck favored preparation and was possible to influence if you knew the right charms. The horseshoe went up above the door. The rock went in your pocket. If luck is not fate, if it is not fixed in advance, then perhaps you can do something about it. Perhaps it can be courted.
The lucky person is not the one who waits but the one who steps into the room. This is luck as a reward for courage, or at least for motion. Fate deals the cards, and we each have a hand to play.
Fortune favors the bold — fortes fortuna adiuvat ~ Terence, Roman playwright, around 151 BCE
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, and preparation is something you control. The solo pursuit of fortune is a genuine drive.
The harder I work, the luckier I get. ~ Samuel Goldwyn
But the shamrock gently disagrees. Four-leaf clovers are natural anomalies, not personal achievements. We can’t earn one, only discover it. Even if you can court luck, even if work and boldness can pull it toward you, it is never yours to fully command.
Luck never gives; it only lends. ~ Swedish proverb
Some people simply have it, inexplicably, in ways that have nothing to do with preparation or boldness or a rabbit’s foot.
Throw a lucky man into the sea, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth. ~ Arabic proverb
Some observe that luck is a finite resource and can be unwisely traded away. This may or may not be true, but as a matter of human priority it is clarifying. We each get chances to test our luck.
Lucky at cards, unlucky in love. ~ English proverb
The tension between fate and will, between earned luck and divine luck, is located in a moment of commitment. The lucky day is not the day something falls in your favor. It is the day you decide it might be worth the effort.
The day you decide to do it is your lucky day. ~ Japanese proverb
Whatever the senders intended and however the recipients replied, these cards demonstrate how providential language holds us together in anticipation of something wonderful just ahead. The possibility that things might go our way.
The symbols of luck nested together in relationship, in abundance, in the living world — a horseshoe wreathed in flowers, overflowing with roses, or flanked by shamrocks — is not an accident of Victorian design sensibility. It draws on the ancient wisdom that friends are the true source of life’s lucky breaks. Love does the work and luck gets the credit.
In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Jacques delivers his monologue in Act II, Scene VII, observing human life with world-weary detachment. He sketches out seven distinct chapters of a human life, from mewling infancy to toothless old age, with equal parts affection and irony. One of the most quoted passages in all of Shakespeare, by the 1880s it was deeply embedded in popular culture — the kind of verse that some households knew by heart.
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
Dobbins’ Electric Soap was manufactured by I. L. Cragin & Co. of Philadelphia and had been on the market since the mid-1860s. By the early 1880s, the company was advertising heavily through trade cards, chromolithographic collectibles that matched the indulgences of the Gilded Age. Cragin’s innovation was to produce not a single card but a series of seven that required the collector to buy a bar of soap each time. Get the certificate from your grocer, and the full set arrived by mail free of charge.
Philly, 1880s. Shakespeare meets laundry.
Front: Each card is a vivid chromolithograph on a warm gold ground with a bold red border, a consistent visual identity that makes the cards a set. The figures are drawn in a coarse comic style, expressive and exaggerated, with each character placed in a domestic or outdoor scene with a bar of Dobbins soap nearby.
First, a round-faced nurse in a white mobcap seated in a rocking chair, holding a squirming naked infant over a washbasin. Card Two shows a sulky schoolboy in a red jacket and yellow-green plaid knickerbockers, satchel over one shoulder. The lover on Card Three is a lanky figure in a gold waistcoat and plaid trousers, leaning against a bureau in a disheveled bedroom.
The soldier on Card Four is wild-haired and red-faced, bent over a green barrel-tub in his uniform trousers and braces, and a sword against the wall behind him. Card Five presents a rotund man in a blue coat, leaning back in his chair with the serene self-satisfaction of someone accustomed to receiving gifts. Card Six is an elderly Harlequin figure in a polka-dotted costume with red stockings, tumbling in mid-air. The final card is a woman in a yellow apron leaning over a green wooden tub, and a billowing human figure made entirely of suds.
Reverse: Black text on cream stock with the full Shakespeare speech across all seven cards, each picking up the verse where the last left off. The final card identifies the source: As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII.
Below the verse, each card runs a version of the same offer in slightly varied language: collect a grocer’s certificate for each bar purchased and mail seven of them to 116 South 4th Street, Philadelphia. Without the certificate, the price for the set is 25 cents.
Each card presents a few product features: no wash boiler, no rubbing board, no house full of steam. Card Four warns against unscrupulous imitations and instructs buyers to ask for Dobbins’ Electric Soap by name. The printer’s imprint for Chas. Shields’ Sons, 20 & 22 Gold Street, New York appears at the foot of each reverse.
Production: These high-quality commercial chromolithographs likely date to the early 1880s, after the business had been in operation for more than a decade. The color registration is precise throughout, the figure work confident and expressive, and the gold-and-red palette gives the set a unified identity that still reads as a coherent series. The illustration style and rich production values mirror the opulent aspirations of the era.
Collectibility: Complete sets of themed trade card series are uncommon; most were distributed individually and rarely survived intact. The Shakespeare framework, the quality of the printing, and the conceptual ambition of the campaign make this set particularly distinctive. It appeals to trade card collectors, Victorian advertising historians, Shakespeare enthusiasts, and ephemera collectors with a taste for the literary and the delightfully absurd.
new Rarities Room
Our new space for the old stuff that no one ever threw away – yay!
Fröken Susanna Pettersson of Sunnansjö, Sweden couldn’t vote, couldn’t earn, and couldn’t easily leave her small village. But in 1903, she could receive romantic postcards. She kept them. But, did she reply?
Rare Cards ~ Four Antique Swedish Postcards Sent to the Same Young Woman
In rural Dalarna, Sweden around 1903, a young woman named Susanna Pettersson receive four romantic postcards from three suitors in nearby towns. All the postcards arrived through the local mail to an address at Tjärnsvedens, Sunnansjö, in the wooded heart of Swedish folk country.
The honorific Fröken printed before her name on every card tells us she was unmarried. In early twentieth century Sweden, it was a title with genuine social weight that was relinquished upon marriage. For Susanna, the boundaries of daily life were drawn by family, church, and society. The careful correspondence of courtship may have provided a sense of choice.
In these years, postcards were at the absolute peak of a golden age. Dominated by the German printing industry and distributed across Europe and abroad, romance cards were a technically sophisticated and lucrative niche in a rapidly growing economy.
These exquisite cards were chosen deliberately by suitors to convey a range of emotion, laden with symbolic images and verses of serious sentiment. In our case, the hand-scripted messages are overt. To send such a postcard was a cautious and considered act, even a declaration. To receive four such cards suggests a woman who inspired intention.
In the early 1900s, Scandinavia was reckoning with questions of identity and sovereignty that touched daily life and daily culture, woven in with the cultural flowering of Larsson, Lagerlöf, Ibsen, Grieg, and Munch. Sweden itself was unsettled. The union with Norway, in place since 1814, was fracturing toward its peaceful but charged dissolution in 1905.
Borlänge, just down the road from Sunnansjö, was growing fast around iron and steel, drawing young men out of villages like Susanna’s into an industrializing economy. The authors of these cards may themselves have been young men who moved away to seek their futures, writing back to Susanna across a widening distance of place and era.
Card 1 ~ Suitor 1 from Norhyttan
Front: An elegantly dressed couple in a richly appointed interior — man in blue-grey jacket, woman in red and gold dress — seated before an ornate folding screen painted with roses. Tropical palm in background.
Många Hjärtliga helsning av han ere…
Many heartfelt greetings from him who is [yours]…
Back: Addressed to Fröken Sanna Persson, Tjärnsvedens, Sunnansjö. Note the affectionate diminutive Sanna rather than the formal Susanna used on other cards. Swedish 5 öre green stamp, Norhyttan postmark, circa 1902.
Correspondence: Lower right, heavily scripted in a practiced pen-and-ink hand. Left margin written vertically. Lower left coded notation: 1. = 1.9. = 1.19. =
Nog vet du att jag älskar dig, fast du det aldrig hört af mig, min och din blick föråda val den tysta lågan i min själ.
You surely know that I love you, even though you have never heard it from me. Mine and your glance betray the silent flame in my soul.
Production and Collector Notes: Premium chromolithograph with gold embossing, likely printed in Germany or Austria. Numbered series notation, Serie 193. Embossed romance cards of this quality with intact original Swedish correspondence are increasingly scarce. Of interest to collectors of Scandinavian ephemera, Edwardian romance, and social history researchers.
Card 2 ~ Suitor 1 from Norhyttan
Front: An archetypal couple stands on a rocky highland landscape with a misty and dramatic backdrop. A man in rough tunic carries a tall staff next to a woman in flowing white dress with loose hair.
Back: Addressed to Fröken Susanna Pettersson, Tjärnsvedens, Sunnansjö. Swedish 5 öre stamp, Norhyttan postmark.
Correspondence: Densely written in heavy hand-scripted text running in multiple directions across the image.
Elfligt lyckligt är att änga — då ned har bäksfloden bringar men nu skralla den nu torka in text hur dyster då det blefo…
Blissfully happy it is to linger — when down the brook brings / but now how gloomy / when it became…
Production and collector notes: Sepia-toned romantic lithograph published in Stockholm by C. Ns Lj., Sthlm.Series 1339. Domestic Swedish production rather than imported German print, comparatively less common for this period and market. The heroic Nordic couple reflects romantic aesthetic prominent in Scandinavian visual culture of the early 1900s. Dense multi-directional handwriting across the image face is biographically significant. Of interest to collectors of Swedish ephemera, Scandinavian social history, and scholars of private correspondence.
Card 3 ~ Suitor 2 from Borlänge
Front: A young woman in a golden-yellow gown reclines on a chaise surrounded by red azaleas and roses, holding a small red book or letter, gazing pensively to one side. Circular vignette set against a rich gold ground with pink Art Deco lattice decoration and heart motifs in each corner.
Back: Addressed to Fröken Susanna Pettersson, Sunnansjö, Gryftångbodarma. The address variation roughly translates to ‘summer farm buildings’ suggesting that Susanna was not at her main home but was staying at a seasonal outpost. Postmark, Borlänge, 1903. Small printer’s horse mark, bottom left.
Correspondence: Rounder and more casual hand-script. Left margin may be a name or family reference.
Så härligt är ej källans öras invid en blomstertal så härlig är ej dagens ljus son tryckt få din hand.
Not so lovely is the murmur of the spring, beside a flower-tale so lovely — not so bright is the light of day, as when pressed upon your hand.
Production and collector notes: Art Nouveau chromolithograph, Serie “Liebesträume” (Dreams of Love), produced by a quality German publisher and distributed internationally, reflecting Germany’s dominant role in the European postcard market of this era. Art Nouveau romance cards with intact Swedish correspondence and Borlänge postmark are notably scarce. Of interest to collectors of Art Nouveau ephemera, Scandinavian material culture, and historians of industrializing Sweden.
Card 4 ~ Suitor 3 from Stockholm
Front: A couple in a garden setting — woman in white and gold embroidered dress seated on a bench with flowers and parasol. Man in dark suit and straw boater hat leaning toward her attentively. Flowering trees surround them.
Back: Addressed to Fröken Susanna Petterson, Tjärnsvedens, Sunnansjö. Postmark origin reads Sto-, stamp damaged, full date not legible. Almost certainly Stockholm, circa 1903.
Correspondence: Written across the upper image in a compressed angular hand, distinct from both previous writers. Faded pen and ink, with partially legible fragments.
Bätt… polset… och mer… bättre…
Better… better… and more… better…
Production and collector notes: Sepia lithograph with gold highlights published by G. L. Hamburg. Serie 1896, a respected German publisher. Hamburg-published cards with intact Swedish correspondence and Stockholm postmarks from this period are collectible. Of interest to collectors of German-published romance cards and Edwardian Scandinavian ephemera.
Susanna Pettersson lived in a world that offered her limited formal choices. But in a small wooden house in Dalarna at the beginning of the last century, she could make her own quiet judgments. She could choose carefully.
Three suitors, three futures. Did she answer any of them? Whether she eventually became Fru or remained Fröken, we can’t discern from the evidence here. All we know is that she kept those four cards all those years.
The postcards in this rare set were sent from the heart of Dalarna, Sweden — the same province that gave the world the iconic Dala horse, a brightly painted wooden folk toy whittled by loggers and miners during long Scandinavian winters. In 1869, Swedish immigrants from Dalarna carried that tradition across an ocean to the Kansas prairie, founding the town of Lindsborg — known today as Little Sweden USA, where you can Hunt for Wild Dalas!
Valentine’s Day is over. The chocolates parceled out, consumed in a binge, or sweetly regifted. The cards are in a stack. Love trudges on.
Before we go, there is a word worth saying about silences and the quiet costs of delayed connections, and those missed entirely.
In May 2023, the Surgeon General issued an advisory that stopped me mid-scroll. Loneliness had reached epidemic levels in the United States. He was not describing the usual suspects—a widower, a loner, someone at the edge of class or condition. I had to admit, his warning rang a bell in my own heart. I was among a growing contingent of the ordinary, ambient, alarmingly average lonely. As a caregiver, days passed without anyone really seeing me, or me really wanting to be noticed.
The Surgeon General called it a public health crisis. He compared its effects on mortality to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Actual harm done.
Indeed, social isolation raises the risk of heart disease, stroke, dementia, and early death. The health research is not soft or sentimental. The body registers being unseen the same way it registers physical pain — same neural pathways, same hormonal alarm signals, same disrupted sleep, same compounding risks. We are living inside a paradox: more connected by technology than any humans in history, and perhaps lonelier than our ancestors.
In the golden age of the postcard — roughly 1900 to 1920 — Americans sent billions of them. A trip to the lake. A hello from the city. A heart, a name, a single line of longing, on full view to the mail carrier and anyone else who handled it along the way. The medium demanded brevity, levity, and a light touch.
That simple approach is worth noticing, because we tend to use the absence of time as our primary excuse for not reaching out. We sense there isn’t room in the average difficult day for a real conversation. So we wait. And the time doesn’t come. And the silence grows.
A postcard is a signal, not a report. It says: I haven’t forgotten. A brief message can make a big point. At times, the whispered delivery bears the full meaning.
The research on what makes people feel less alone points not to the depth of connection in any given moment, but to its consistency. There is comfort in the reliable sense that someone, somewhere, is holding you in mind. A brief, warm gesture, repeated, does more for that feeling than an overwrought or inconsistent one.
Simple gestures are not consolation prizes. They are the architecture of belonging.
Sadly true, is often easier to extend kindness to a stranger than to sustain the loving glow among the people you know best. A stranger on a difficult day can receive warmth without a complicated history. They don’t owe you a response and you likely won’t know how the gift was felt. You haven’t let them down in the small accumulated ways that life’s closeness allows.
The people we love most are the ones we are most likely to let drift or actively ignore. A peculiar paralysis comes with the familiar foibles, caring deeply, and feeling the gap widen.
So here is a gentle nudge, the week after the holiday, when the pressure is off and the expectations are low. Not because it’s February. Because it’s Wednesday, and someone who loves you needs to know. A postcard or a hug, a humble tug on the sleeve or a quiet walk. None of it asks or offers too much. A simple, “We are ok,” can be enough.
I don’t dare reveal the flipsides of the love-laced cards you’re about to see. What Ida, Minnie, or Gertrude sent or received isn’t for you or me.
Hand-delivered to Arthur from Jack, this first example is our single exception. With a humble request and an elegant script, we can only hope the romance of a lifetime began, heated up, or settled in. Maybe it was placed on the pillow that morning, sometime before 1907 when postcards still featured undivided backs.
My own love is famously far afield. In the early days, our photograph appeared in a magazine alongside a short interview on the workings of our long-distance affair. We were an ocean away in those days, and on the adventure of a lifetime together. It could be a car drive now, albeit a very long one. Always tempting!
Obviously.
Yes, let’s do!
Finding here anywhere we meet.
Snowcrete!
Little Blue Carriage for Two
Future Flights
Love, Your Guardi-Anne.
Languages are a passion and a profession for my lady linguist. So a few more out of pure fun and fascination. Luf yah!
Dear readers, I promised you hearts and flowers after that awkward spell last week. First, a gallery carefully curated on the theme. Then, elucidations and another peek.
Made-for-you messages with showy sentiments on full view to your pa, your ma, and the mail carrier, too.
Some parts are still snowy, as love lamps flicker on in February. Hearts, words, and birds arrive in the quiet winter glow. Rest inside a circle of love. When you know, you know.
We’ll get to the hearts and flowers. But first, this is awkward.
It’s February. Congratulations if you have accomplished anything this year.
I spent the morning sorting through Valentine’s greetings. Love is in the air, and rest assured there are albums full of gorgeous arrangements and heartfelt sentiments in the weeks ahead.
But first, I need to bring up something awkward. Not everyone loves this sweetheart’s holiday. For the lovelorn, it’s excruciating. For the grieving, a sad set of reminders. For the wicked, a chance to lance the joy bubbles in the air.
In postcards, we have to acknowledge the neck strain.
Also, captions that might have meant exactly what they suggest.
Lastly, those with an anti-Valentine vibe, a bad bargain, or even a threat!
We will return next week to the regular schedule of sweetness and light, heart and flowers, charm and chocolate, passion and promises. How… delightful!
Tom finally touches grass, and Lily paints impossible cats.
Tom’s rental car idled at a red light on University, three blocks from his apartment. He’d made it through Sky Harbor quickly, drove straight here without stopping for groceries or coffee or errands. Just land and figure out what’s next, he thought.
The apartment was small, on the second floor of a stucco complex built in the eighties. View of the parking lot. He’d signed the lease abruptly after Delia died. Left the house for Nina to handle. Since then—hotel rooms in Atlanta, crew bunks in Singapore, a fishing boat off Catalina.
He parked, climbed the stairs, unlocked the door to recycled air and silence, flipped through the mail piled on the counter from the last time he was here. He missed the last local election. There was a party in a park nearby. A local group is replacing trees that were damaged in the last freak storm.
He set his bag down, pulled out his phone, texted Nina before he could reconsider.
I’m in Tempe. Can we meet? That coffee shop you like?
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Yup, be up there tomorrow. 10am.
Tom exhaled. Opened the refrigerator, stared at nothing for a moment, and closed it. He sat on the couch, looked at the unpacked boxes, looked at the random furniture. Looked at his hands, and thought, tomorrow. Then he grabbed his keys to run out for a beer and a burrito.
At the coffee shop, Tom arrived early, ordered coffee he didn’t drink, watched the door. Nina came in exactly at ten. Saw him, hesitated, turned toward the line, but walked over to her dad instead.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Nina set her keys on the table and went to get her drink. A few minutes to breathe and focus while she waited in line. He was actually here. Wow.
Back at the table, Tom tried to start, stopped, and started again. Exasperated, he whispered a groan. “How do people do this?”
“Well, you always asked Mom.”
“Truth,” he conceded. “I keep getting on planes. Keep going up. Can’t figure out how to stay down.”
Nina’s face was careful, neutral. “I know. You send postcards.”
“Lonely postcards.”
“I like them.” She paused, a little surprised herself.
“This woman I know at work told me about her father. He came back from the internment camps different. Couldn’t talk about what he’d lost. Just went quiet. Disappeared into himself even when he was sitting right there.”
Tom blinked at her, stunned by the comparison. “I’m not—”
“I know you’re not. But you get away from a lot up there.”
Tom set his coffee down. “Look… I’m trying… to be present… more.”
“Okay.” Nina’s hands tightened around her cup.
“Let me know when you’re back, next,” she said slowly. “We could meet at your place. Maybe make it feel like home.”
“Sure. that’s good. It doesn’t feel like anything right now.”
They finished their coffee, scooted out of the booth, and hugged. Nina picked up her keys.
Tom drove back to the apartment. Stood in the doorway looking at the accumulation of a life he’d been avoiding.
He started with the kitchen. Unpacked Delia’s dishes, the set they’d used for at least thirty years. Put them in the cabinets. Drove to the grocery store, bought coffee and bread and eggs. Real food that would probably rot. Fine, that might actually be normal. Small steps. He’d try again tomorrow.
The knock came mid-morning. George opened the door to find Lily holding a canvas bag, Mai standing behind her with a patient smile.
Lily marched into the foyer, serious. “I brought MY paints.”
“She wanted to paint, here, with you,” Mai said.
“CATS! We want to paint cats,” she announced.
“Well then.” George stepped aside. “Come in.”
They set up at the kitchen table—Jennie’s old watercolor set now showing signs of use again. Lily arranged her brushes with care, filled a bowl with water, selected paper from the pad.
“Could you get the big book, Grandpa?” Lily asked.
George knew exactly the one she wanted. Large and heavy, and art book with full color illustrations. Yes, cats, and many more species with great examples of all variety to try one’s hand.
George pulled his chair to face the window. Lily pulled hers beside his. They worked together, silently, side by side. Lily’s brush moved in quick confident patterns. Bold strokes, loose shapes that captured moments more than detail.
George surprised himself by drawing with a sharp graphite pencil. His hands remembered motions he hadn’t used in years. Careful lines, patient shading, the disciplined attention that both he and Jennie loved.
Lily finished first. Held up her painting. “It’s not exactly right.”
“Tell me more…”
“The shape isn’t right. The lines don’t add up. It doesn’t look like a real cat.”
“Artists see differently than scientists,” George said. “Scientists measure. Artists feel. Both ways matter. Your colors are very bold.”
Lily considered this. Looked at his drawing, and said confident,”Yours is the scientist way.”
“Can I keep yours?”
“If I can keep yours.”
“Deal.”
Mai came back an hour later. Lily packed her supplies, carefully laying her paintings on the countertop to dry. At the door, she hugged George—quick, unselfconscious, generous.
After they left, George found a frame in the closet and mounted the entirely impossible animal—calm, loose, joyful. Hung it where he’d see it every morning.
The postcard arrived in Tucson ten days after Nora mailed it. Nina turned it over. Nora’s handwriting, smaller now, more compact.
Lunar New Year, red lanterns everywhere. The city transforms—fireworks, night markets, families. The work is good, the project is extending. Solitude still a gift.—N
Nina read it twice. Carried it inside. Pinned it to her wall beside the others. Seven postcards now, creating their own pattern. Different textiles, different messages, her same friend after all this time. She pulled out her phone, typed a response.
Got your latest. Glad you’re staying. Take your time.
Each travel alone, except the air they share. Nora is happy going solo, and Tom is somewhere in between.
The teahouse was tucked next to a dumpling shop on a narrow lane in Da’an District. Nora walked past it three times before noticing the English sign: Tea by Appointment Only.
Inside, a woman near seventy arranged porcelain cups on a low table. She glanced up, assessed Nora with a single look, and gestured to the cushion.
“First time?”
“First time for tea ceremony,” Nora said. “Not first time feeling lost.”
The woman smiled. Poured water over the leaves. The scent rose—something green and grassy, nothing like the black tea Nora’s grandmother used to brew.
“Lost is good,” the woman said. “A reason to pay attention.”
Nora’s colleague Mei-Ling had taken pity after watching Nora eat lunch alone for the third week running. “You need to get out,” Mei-Ling had said. “Explore. Be alone in a place that’s not your apartment.”
So here she was. Alone. Not lonely.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Nina. Nora silenced it without reading.
The tea was bitter, then sweet. She drank slowly.
“You travel alone?” the woman asked.
“Always.”
Nora had spent years cultivating solitude—long drives through Arizona backcountry, dawn hikes in Sabino Canyon, evenings on her balcony with no one talking. She chose the Taipei assignment partly for the chance to be anonymous and untethered.
The woman poured another cup. “Tourists look for what they expect to see. Solo travelers find who is actually there, including themselves.”
Nora thought about the next postcard to Nina. She wanted to tell her about the teahouse, the silence, the strange comfort of being somewhere no one knew her name.
It’s lovely to be solo in a strange land. Watching without explaining. Moving without negotiating. I sometimes forget who I am at home.
She finished her tea, bowed to the woman, stepped back into the crowded street feeling lighter than she had in months.
Tom stood on the deck of a fishing charter near Catalina, watching the captain clean yellowtail in the afternoon sun. He worked the knife along the spine with practiced efficiency, lifting the skin and scattering ribbons of bronze scales across the wet deck.
Tom was at sea three days, paid in full. His time between flights was long enough, he could have gone to Phoenix to check on the empty apartment. Or driven the two hours to Tucson to talk to Nina. Instead, he’d gone straight from the airport to the marina.
The ocean felt safer to Tom. He knew what he was dealing with—wind, current, the pull of the moon. On land, everything felt unmoored and awash in silence. The apartment with no one else there. Nina’s careful, measured heartache. The desperate life he’d abandoned in favor of flight schedules and hotel rooms.
The captain looked up. “You alright, man?”
“Fine.”
“You don’t look fine. You thinking about jumping?”
Tom laughed, the gallows humor helped. “Not far enough down.”
The captain went back to his work. Tom watched the horizon. His daughter was not far away. Working at the hospice. Taking care of people the way she’d taken care of her mother. While he was gone somewhere over the Pacific.
Tom didn’t make it to Jennie’s funeral. Delia was still sick and he had a flight schedule to keep. George hadn’t said much.
When Delia died two months later, George drove from Minnesota. Stayed ten days. Made coffee, answered the phone, helped with plans, and stood beside Tom at the service. Then, George drove back alone. Tom couldn’t make himself useful like that to anybody. Couldn’t even make himself stay.
A raven landed on the railing, tilted its head.
“Where’d you come from?” Tom asked.
The raven looked at Tom, croaked once, deep in its throat.
Suddenly the words came to him. He didn’t have a pen or a postcard handy, but finally he had something to say.
Flying solo is for the birds.
The raven lifted off, circled once, flew toward shore. Tom watched until it disappeared, then looked at his phone. He could get out of LA tonight, and rework his schedule from Phoenix next week. Enough time to get to Tucson and back, and to try.
The envelope arrived among the usual stack. Tom’s cramped handwriting unmistakable on the address. George carried it inside, set it on the kitchen table, made coffee before opening it.
Inside, a single sheet torn from a legal pad, Tom’s words filling margin to margin. George read it twice.
George— Sorry it’s been so long. Don’t know how to say what needs to get out.
Been working more flights than I should. Phoenix to anywhere. Hotel rooms are easier. Nina barely talks to me. Can’t blame her.
You drove all the way to Delia’s funeral. Made everything possible. I should’ve done the same for you and Jennie. Told myself it was work. We both know better. You’ve always been better at this life.
Tom was a restless kid — climbing trees, running off, coming home with scraped knees. George stayed close, watched birds, kept track of his brother.
After Jennie died, Tom just wasn’t around. George wanted to be angry but didn’t have the strength. Grief made him numb for awhile. Now, he was just glad to have his brother back, or at least a longer letter.
Mrs. Hanabusa sat by her window in the common room, as she often did. Hands folded in her lap. Face turned toward the light. Eyes resting gently on the flowering hibiscus outside.
Nina paused in the hallway, watching.
How did she keep such a calm reserve? After the camps, after losing everything, seeing your family degraded. How did she maintain that peace?
She would probably credit her mother, her grandmothers, and their extended friends and family. All gone, except her sister. How does she do it, still?
Mrs. Hanabusa turned her head slightly and smiled.
Nina smiled back, and walked on.
The story above is fiction, but the new Postcard People feature is real life! Meet Christine N. from Switzerland, who posts about her grandmother’s collection.
Like the flash of a red cardinal in the winter snow, both George and Nina suddenly see something that has been there all along.
George woke early in the day on New Year’s Eve. Light snow outside and the question he’d been turning over since Christmas: when to take Emma birding. He called before he could overthink it.
“Tomorrow morning?” Mai answered. “She’ll be ready at dawn.”
They met at Frontenac State Park at first light. Emma hopped out of Mai’s car already dressed for the cold—layers, boots, a hat George recognized as one of her mother’s favorites. Mai waved from the driver’s seat, smiled, pulled away.
“Just us?” George asked.
Emma’s eyes rolled slightly and smirked as she held up his binoculars. She’d already adjusted the strap. The green Audubon field guide was tucked under one arm, a new notebook in her other hand.
“Mom has to get ready for the party. Plus, she said it’s too cold.”
“Fair enough,” George smiled back and nodded toward the trailhead. “Binos up, move slowly, scan and listen. You go first.”
They walked the trail along the frozen river in tandem, as quietly and patiently as he had advised. Not looking for birds exactly, but for movement, for shapes that didn’t fit the pattern of branches and sky. Emma spotted the first cardinal.
“There,” she whispered.
George raised his older binoculars. He had kept them for Jennie on the rare occasion she wanted to come along.
“Tan body, red-orange bill, and a sort-of red crest,” Emma slowly described the bird.
“Good eye. Watch how she moves.”
The bird hopped branch to ground, ground to branch.
“How did you know it was female?” Emma asked.
“Colors and the song notes. Males are showier and louder. Females sing too. They’re just quieter about it.”
Emma opened her notebook.
Female cardinal. Frontenac State Park. New Year’s Day. Feeding on lower branches of sumac. Light song noted.
They found chickadees, a downy woodpecker, juncos, and stopped along the way to record and discuss each bird. Emma’s notes filled two pages. George watched her move through the stark and cold forest—confident, curious, at ease. Mai had been more careful at this age, tentative on the trails. Emma walked as though she belonged here. She did.
Driving her home, George said, “You’re a natural. Your mom was good, too. She could walk so slowly, make no noise at all.”
Emma smiled. “She says I get it from you.”
“Well, I got this for us,” George said as he pulled into the driveway.
He flashed his phone screen to reveal the app he had downloaded, the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds but online and searchable. Right on the front, the very first photo was a male and female pair of Northern Cardinals.
Emma’s eyes lit up. Quietly, she imagined how many they’d find all over Minnesota in the days and weeks and (hopefully) years ahead.
Back home, George leaned out of the window to pick up the mail before driving down the ice-packed drive. He tossed the stack on the seat. On top, a photo of an American Airlines plane. He knew who it was before he turned it over.
Flight delay. Thinking about you and Jennie. Can’t believe they’re both gone. —T
His younger brother, Tom, both of them widowers now. Their wives were gone within months of each other. At times, they both worried they would lose each other, too. Too much pain, way too much.
George had been waiting for Tom to call. He knew that constant work and distance was his way of coping, but how long was too long?
George looked at Tom’s card again, familiar but this time a sudden realization hit him. Tom sends postcards. He’d received at least a half a dozen over the years–all photos of old jets. George had never written back. Not once. He’d been waiting for the phone to ring. Now he remembered the little collection of airplanes in his desk drawer.
He sat down. Pulled a card from his own growing stack, a color photo of a trail like today’s but after the thaw. His message was short, with room for more later.
Got your card. Miss them every day. Miss talking to you. —George
He addressed it to Tom’s apartment in Phoenix, the one he’d moved to after Delia died, and rarely slept in. Stamped it. Put on his coat and walked back out to the mailbox, certain of what he’d been missing.
Nina found Mrs. Hanabusa arranging flowers in the common room—a small practical arrangement, simple stems in a shallow dish.
“For the holiday?” Nina asked.
“My own amusement.” Mrs. Hanabusa adjusted a branch. “Ikebana, flowers carry meaning. Not just pretty, it’s a message.”
“What does this one say?” Nina asked.
Mrs H pointed to the chrysanthemum. “This one means longevity, joy. Used in autumn arrangements and also at funerals. Pomegranate. Internal life, good luck, and natural cycles of life and death.”
Nina watched her work. The precise angles, the negative space.
Mrs. Hanabusa stood up and moved back to considered her creation. “New year. Endurance through winter. Joy waiting to flower. Life coming and going all the time.”
She looked at Nina. “What’s your story?”
Nina placed her postcard on the table and sat down. A cluster of saguaro against a bright blue sky, blank on the other side.
“I don’t know what to say to him,” Nina whispered.
“Ikebana, we don’t fill all the space. We leave room. Leave room,” said Mrs. Hanabusa with some emphasis this time.
Nina thought for a moment, and wrote:
Got your note. Like the saguaro, I’m still here. Hug? —N
Not forgiveness. Not resolution. Presence and a little humor, with some room. She added her father’s address in Phoenix. Stamped it and set it by her keys, knowing that it still might take days to put it in the mail.
The next morning, a third card from Nora arrived—black and white geometric patterns, stark and beautiful. An Inuit quilt made of duck knecks.
Mrs. Hanabusa was at the window again when Nina came in. Nina showed her the card. Mrs. H studied the design, then turned it over to read the back.
Found a noodle shop I love. Made friends at work. Some days are hard, some surprise me by how easily I could stay longer. —N
Mrs. Hanabusa looked up. “She signs just ‘N.’ Like you do.”
Nina blinked. She’d never noticed.
“My sister and I had our own shorthand, too. Still do.” Mrs. Hanabusa handed the card back carefully. “Secret code.”
Nina looked at the card again. The simple N. The years of friendship.
On her way home, she stopped at the blue mailbox on the corner. Pulled out the cactus card she’d written to her father to look at how she’d signed it. Just N.
She dropped it in the slot, heard it fall, and said a humble prayer. What else had she not noticed along the way?
The Posted Past 