A First Postcard.

I just got home from one of those days doing what I do every day because I have to and I’m tired.

I did the same thing yesterday.

The house is still the same mess it was the day before with all the things waiting to be done, that have to be done, but which I don’t want to do because I have to do them and I have always done them and I’m tired.

So I went and looked in the letter-box.

There was a parcel and a postcard!

I love postcards.

It’s maybe because I’m old fashioned and no one ever sends postcards any more but there is also such a simple, beautiful unnecessity about them..

And they always get a stamp, not a machine post frank-thingy.

Someone has sat at a favourite café, maybe chosen a special pen and written something intimate open for everyone to read if they care to.

But probably no one has, just me.

Some one’s kissed that stamp, or held it in their fingers and softly dabbed it into the centre of a sponge sitting in a bowl of water.

Or perhaps just lightly touched it to the ocean lapping at their feet where they stand.

And some one has looked for a post box in a town they don’t know and which has probably painted it a different colour from the town where they live.

Perfect.

Thank you.

This one is from my daughter who in fact wrote it on a train but the post boxes were red and they are yellow here so I got that bit right, though she is English and probably knows they are red without anyone having to tell her so she probably didn’t spend hours wandering a foreign city wondering why they don’t have any letter-boxes.

It starts –“I am wet, wet, wet, absolutely soaking!”

She’s in England.

Her friend, my friend too, added at the bottom “Send you lot’s of wet kisses.”

Are there any better?

(I love parcels too but this is about postcards).

Today’s is not the first postcard I have received this year -  that honour rests with the one pictured above.

It came a couple of weeks back, travelling far to bring stories and tales unknown ‘till then and with two really beautiful stamps embossed with letters unlike any in my own alphabet.

A foreign window.

Postcard season is OPEN!