I’ve been a packrat for as long as I’ve had possessions. Mom made increasingly futile attempts over the years to get me to throw out illegible scribblings, broken toys, once-treasured stuffed animals long left in dust. It was a holiday in the Findley family when I moved just about the last of my boxes out of the basement and into my Chicago apartment. I’ve gotten a lot better over the years, but I still keep more than I should.

My penmanship will be just as fancy-looking but illegible.

So it was not too surprising when, cleaning up my desk at work a few weeks ago, I found a stack of paper three years old. It was the remains of one of those page-a-day calendars, the theme of this one being “1,001 Places to See Before You Die” (a morbid way of looking at it, and clunkier than “The Bucket List,” but it sure did have a lot of pretty pictures). I’d torn off the pages and kept them in a stack because they might come in handy someday. When? What day would a stack of frayed-edge color landscape photos from 2008 come in handy for anything?

I found a use for them. I decided, in the tradition of the marvelous Mlle. O’Leary, I needed to step up my non-electronic communication, so I’m making postcards out of the old calendar and sending them to friends all over the world. It’s not a hard thing to do, or a skilled one, but it’s fun to sit in front of the latest Parks & Rec pasting photos on cardstock and writing affectionate messages on the back. It’s a good time to pause and think about the person I’m writing and ogle the scenery on the postcard.

I’m sending at least one postcard a week from now until next September when I leave on my trip, so if you want one, just let me know. Don’t put your address in the comments, because don’t put your address on the Internet, good grief I hope you know that, but do drop a note if you’d like a postcard and you can email me your postal address. I can’t promise when or what stunning vista you’ll receive, but I will promise that sometime in the next year, you’ll get a handmade postcard in the mail from me. Here we go!

Image from here.