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.