Postcard: Poppy and serendipity

We (the Dad, the boyos, and I) spent last week in Sacramento.  The Dad had meetings and work, while the boys and I explored the wet city from underneath brand-new umbrellas.  We put tokens into the Art-o-Mat at the Crocker, ate really good ramen, explored Old Sac, saw Sutter's Fort and the Indian Museum, and of course visited the library! The Dad even got to join us for an evening hike at the Effie Yeaw nature preserve, which is breathtakingly beautiful in spring.  We saw wood ducks, mallards, and both great egrets and snowy egrets. The great egrets stood like stately statues, while the snowies would stand still for about ten seconds and then suddenly scramble and pounce through the shallows and stab their long beaks into the water.  When they popped back up, they looked confused and stunned.  Probably they were actually catching something small like snails, but to us they looked like awkward children trying and repeatedly failing to snatch some small, swift creature from the river.

While we were in Sacramento, this arrived at home--a postcard from another visit to the same city.

I think I've mentioned how terrible I am with watercolors.  I haven't a clue how to use them but I'm drawn to them anyway, especially on ephemeral projects like the postcards.  I figure I'd be excited to find a postcard in a library book no matter what the art looked like, and if it's poorly done then there's less temptation to keep it rather than dropping it in the mail. 

Keeping, of course, is always a possibility, but we're grateful for every finder who sends the cards back to us!  This one wrote simply:

GREETINGS FROM SACRAMENTO PUBLIC LIBRARY
828 I STREET
SACRAMENTO, CA 95814 

Thanks, finder, for returning it home!

Postcard: Bear, and a mystery half-solved! Maybe...

This beauty came back to us today after nearly two years!

It was placed in Portland in 2016.  When it arrived in the mail, it looked familiar--but I knew none of us had drawn it.  I remember a discussion about the bear, and I'm pretty sure other people had drawn bears in that same creative session--I vaguely remember someone not liking their bear.  It may even have been me.  But for the life of me I couldn't figure out whose art this was.  Even the signature didn't help.

And then it hit me!  We had a couple of LDS missionaries to dinner (as we often do), and invited them to draw postcards for an upcoming trip.  One of those young men turned out to be really artistic, and I'm pretty sure this is his work.  Just a quick little drawing, but so fun!  I wish my memory wasn't so spotty so I could give him a shoutout by name, but it's been a long time and I forget things easily.

Of course, it's possible that I'm mixing up two people, or that I'm otherwise mis-remembering.  The flower in particular gives me pause...such an unexpected detail for a young man to add...but I love how the bear seems to be gazing down at it.  (Especially since the artist managed to give that impression with two tiny dot-eyes.)

The finder writes:

Hi,
I found this postcard in the downtown Portland library, probably less than 6 months after you left it.  I just re-found it when I cleaned up some papers form a vacation--oops!  It was a fun thing to find and re-find, and I hope you enjoy getting it back!
Tracy Thomas
Portland OR
Thanks, Tracy, for playing along!