Dear Me

there's nobody you can't send a postcard to

My daughter and I have been traveling in Alaska for the last couple of weeks. We have been puking on charter boat captains, getting asked not to come back to senior aquacise, begging to be fed raw turnips, waving at moose in cul-de-sacs, and otherwise enjoying ourselves. Traveling got me thinking about the art of writing postcards, which I have waxed on about before.

Up in Alaska, they call these kid-approved car snacks “Snow Apples.”

I’m just as enthusiastic about them as I was last year. You can write a postcard while stuck on a long car ride, or when your plane is delayed, or on the shore of a glacier-fed lake. You can scrawl the four words you know on it, or squeeze a solid fifty in. You can buy cheezy tourist postcards when you’re a cheezy tourist, or bring a book of watercolor postcards and some art supplies and make your own. Heck, you can collage random things on the back of a cereal box and inscribe your message on the gray side, as long as you cut it to regulation postcard size.

Also, everybody loves getting postcards! I mean, there is probably somebody who doesn’t like postcards, but I don’t think we need to worry about that.

Some people (etc.) who would almost certainly like a postcard:

• Great-grandparents

• Grandparents

• Parents

• Aunts

• Uncles

• Cousins

• Second cousins twice removed

• Friends

• Classmates

• Senators

• Teachers

• Neighbors

• Favorite hometown businesses

• Authors

• Dogs

• Governors

• Yourself

That’s right — nobody says you can’t send a postcard to yourself, as Alice did:

Dear Alice and Dear Becca,

I hope you enjoyed your trip. How soon will you be back?

Love,

Alice

It arrived at our house the day after we did, and she was very pleased.