my life in postcards

I've been collecting postcards for as long as I can remember.

It started when I was little and my dad would send me postcards from his business trips. Here's my very first postcard. It's from 1983. I was four.


I love this one from 1986. I was seven (and evidently the same size as a striped bass!).

Here's another early postcard my dad sent when visiting my grandparents, Mimi and Papa, at their house in Belmar, New Jersey. The cool thing about this card is that you can see their house in the aerial view (see the arrow). My dad still spends his summers in this house.

When I was in elementary school, an elderly friend of the family became my postcard pen pal. Uncle Charlie and I exchanged dozens of postcards. I saved them all and my collection really took off. Uncle Charlie died when I was a teenager, but I'm glad I have all these funny little notes from him.

In this one, he told me to tell my brother that if a toad pees tobacco juice on him, he will turn into a leprechaun!

Here's a postcard he sent me in 1990 that says he just "popped over to Paris for a few days." Note that the card is postmarked from Baltimore!


I have a lot of postcards...
I have postcards that people sent me.

I have postcards from places I've been. And places I haven't.

I have blank postcards from when I started collecting them on my own. My parents were happy to buy me a few postcards from our vacations (which were always to New Jersey) - since they're a cheap souvenir (the postcards, not my parents...). I started amassing hundreds of them. For some reason the New Jersey postcards always had seagulls on them.

I have postcards from my kindergarten BFF who moved away when we were six. We haven't seen each other since then (it's been over 25 years!), but we kept in touch all this time through letters and postcards.

I have postcards from my sweet Mimi. She died nine years ago.

And my dad kept sending me postcards from his business trips even when I was a teenager. The only difference was that he wrote them in cursive now and he signed his name Dad instead of Daddy.

Here's three that he sent me all in one week from a trip to California in 1996. I was seventeen.

I have postcards from when I spent a summer in college traveling through Spain and Portugal.



I have postcards from when I spent a semester abroad in Florence.


Evidently, I really liked this postcard of Pisa.

I have oversized postcards and postcard books.

I have postcards with stamps from all over the world from Postcrossing.

When Larry and I started dating, he sent me postcards from all the places that he went on business trips - just like my dad did 20 years earlier.

I have postcards from places that Larry and I have traveled together.

As a child, I kept the postcards in the desk drawer in my bedroom. They have holes in the corners from being tacked to bulletin boards. They have sticky stuff on the backs from when I wallpapered my dorm room with them. For the past few years they've all been stored in a shoebox in the closet.
Recently, I decided that I should do something with all the postcards and I've been sorting through them. The ones with messages on the back are the most precious, and I want to archive and display the notes I've received throughout the years and the places I've been. Right now I'm up to my eyeballs in postcards and travel memorabilia (that clear spot on the floor is where I was sitting)...

This might take a while...