1,000 Postcards

I started Postcrossing in summer of 2021. I’ve written before about how this has been a fun way to travel vicariously and to connect with people from many different cultures (many of them German, since Germans are mad about postcards, which has been great for my language learning).

They don’t count the postcards you’ve sent until they’ve actually been received (some of them never arrive, sadly — I have 15 “expired” postcards on my list of traveling postcards, and there have been many more but they take them down at some point). I just received notification that the postcard pictured at right, Wayne Thiebaud’s painting of women’s shoes, arrived — that makes 1,000.

Yes, it’s an expense. Yes, it’s a bit trivial, what with the state of the world and all. And yes, for that brief moment between when I ask for a new address and one appears on my screen, a world of possibility opens. (There’s also the eager trip to the mailbox to see if any postcards have arrived for me; this week, I got cards from Albania and Serbia, both of them new origin countries.)