Postcard Feature: Salt and Pepper

One place we visited often for a while was Helena, Montana, where The Dad once had employees he needed to visit.  While he worked, Anna and the little boys and I would ride the carousel, swim in the hotel pool, hike, windowshop in Last Chance Gulch (and visit the toy store there!), and eat local food. Helena is where I had a Cajun crawfish taco so spicy I broke out in a hot sweat.  It's also where Jesse (one of the twins, then just 4) fell in love with the general manager of the Days Inn, whose walk he could recognize without looking.  He called her the Mom in the Black Shoes.

We often take inspiration from whatever happens to be around--like the salt and pepper shakers on a restaurant table.

This postcard, drawn by Anna, was discovered by a schoolteacher.  And to be honest, until I asked her for a postcard to feature, I didn't even know it had been returned! But what a wonderful story it came back with.

It says, Wow.  What a surprise it was to find this postcard tucked inside the book Horton's Miraculous Mechanisms by Lissa Evans.  I am an elementary teacher in Helena, MT and was looking for a good read aloud for my 1-3rd graders.  I'm not sure about this book yet, but it's pretty good. This book and postcard have traveled to Spokane, WA and Glacier National Park and some remote Montana places!  I hope you get a lot of postcards back!  Annie Tague

Anna keeps her returned postcards in this little gold evening bag.  

Postcard feature: Goji

Obviously, there wouldn't be a Lost Postcard Project blog without the postcards.

Well, okay, there would. There are actually quite a few Lost Postcards blogs, and we recognize that while we might have been the first Project (given that we created and hid our first postcards in Iona, Idaho in 2006), we are slow bringing it to the Blogworld. So let me start out by apologizing for being, in part, redundant. For the record, I tried to get the girl to agree to change the project's name to something more unique and maybe also more precise. Because the postcards aren't exactly lost, are they?

I suggested Misplaced Postcards, Forgotten Postcards, Unexpected Postcards (my personal favorite), Surprise Postcards--all kinds of postcards. But she wouldn't have it. She was, after all, six years old when she drew and hid her first postcard. She will be sixteen early next year, which means Lost Postcards represent nearly two-thirds of her life. She has a limited store of memories from the years before Lost Postcards. And in all that time, that significant segment of her existence on this earth, the Postcard Project has been Lost.

So, Lost it remains. And honestly, quite a few of the postcards really are lost now. Not all of them come back. We were especially unsuccessful with that first adventure, and it sort of hurts to think of all her sweet little first-grader artwork out there somewhere.

But our return rate has improved a lot since then. We have a little store of returned postcards. She has hers in a little bag in her room. I keep mine...well, in a considerably less organized fashion. But I keep them.

And if you're reading this, you probably want to see them. Well, maybe you don't care. But we want to show them to you, and it's our blog, so you're just going to have to deal with it.

We should have featured the first one we ever got back, of course, but we can't remember which one it was. So instead, we're going to start off with one that was a favorite of both of us when we hid it, and came back to us with about the best note ever. The finder was kind enough to give my elephant both a name, and an adventure.This is Goji, hidden in the Denver Public Library in July 2015, and returned to us postmarked New Jersey (New Jersey!) in August.

The front of the postcard, taken before we visited the Denver Library.

The postcard as it was returned to us.

What a wonderful return! Here's the fun story the postcard came back with, in a handwriting full of character (I'm a calligrapher, too; I notice these things):

Goji the elephant had forgotten the way home, which is odd, since elephants never forget. 

While wandering with a friend through the plains, a great storm arose suddenly, and he became separated from his friend. He was alone. He cried for hours and days, until a soft voice called to him. Clearing his wet eyes, he saw a brilliant phoenix smiling kindly at him. A voice calmed him, "Do not cry, my dear. Never are you totally lost. My name is Keegan. Pleased to meet you. Your big ears are so beautiful!"  

Goji blushed and thanked Keegan. "My name is Goji, and I want to go home! I miss my friends."

"We'll get you there," the phoenix responded with care as she carried him in her claws, flying away. "You made it all the way to Cape May, NJ while lost!"

Thank you, Keegan, for returning our elephant, and for giving us such an adventure!

--mejaka and Anna

So many of the things we love

Early summer, 2006.

My 40th birthday.

I was spending it at a friend's house in Iona, Idaho (which is so small some Idahoans have never heard of it).  My husband had business in town, my friend and her husband were at work, and I was alone with my children and hers for the day.

It had the makings of a pretty miserable birthday, especially given that 40 isn't that great of a milestone to reach in the first place.

On a whim, I decided to invite the kids to make some art with me.  I had some postcard-sized cardstock and my little box of art toys (pencils, markers, and old eyeshadows), so why not?

The boys weren't interested, but my daughter, Anna, loved to draw.  She and I spent an enjoyable afternoon ignoring the boys and making little handmade postcards.  Being six and curious, she wanted to know what we would do with them when we were done.

Not that my life is entirely run on whims, but when she asked, I found myself answering, "Let's take them to the library and hide them in library books.  We can address them to ourselves and see if any of them come back!"

The Iona library was a small room in the basement of City Hall.  Because we are book lovers and avid readers (we'd have read through that library's collection in a matter of weeks!), we hid the postcards in books that seemed obscure, because we didn't want the postcards to beat us home.

They didn't.  In fact, we never saw any of those postcards again.

But we were intrigued by the idea of making art, hiding it in library books, and getting it back in the mail, maybe with a note from the person who found it. What if, every time we left our hometown, we would take blank postcards and an art toybox and continue the project? It involved so many of the things we love--Postcards, libraries, mail, art, books, travel, stories, and people.

So, we did.  We hid postcards in Seattle. In Portland.  In Coeur d'Alene and Hayden.  In Salt Lake City.  In Helena.  In Evanston.  In Denver.

People mailed them back.

And nearly ten years later, we finally decided that it was a real project, and not just a whim.

We started this blog to keep track of it.