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.)

Drawing a Postcard

It’s actually very difficult to find postcards of Davis to send to people around the world through Postcrossing. Often people request “pictures of your town” and there really aren’t any photos for sale here of things like the Davis train station or the Arboretum when the redbud is out. But recently someone I was assigned to send a postcard to wanted a bird, an OWL, and preferably a drawing of one.

I like drawing birds of prey and especially owls. I like giving the suggestion of the softness of their feathers. I hope I did this bird some justice… we have a pair locally; I heard one the other night.

Postcrossing

I joined Postcrossing in July 2021. This is a website where you set up a profile and then send, and receive, postcards from all over the world. It’s not direct correspondence, nor the dreaded chain mail — it’s literally getting sent a postcard from a randomly selected sender, and being assigned a random addressee of your own.

It’s not really random, of course, because what you put on your profile does affect who you’ll send cards to. Since I have listed a number of foreign languages spoken or understood, I am assigned more destinations than pure randomness might dictate. Also, Germans are ferocious postcard senders, and an astonishing 624 of the 830 postcards I’ve sent to date have been to Germany. (I am thrilled by this because I always write the card in German for practice. Though the text is somewhat repetitive, I always try to match what I write to the recipient’s interests.)

On my profile I say I’m a birder, and that I’d love to receive postcards of birds from the sender’s country. An amazing thing is that over half of the 828 postcards I’ve received to date have been of birds. I get so many I frequently have to change the wall of them on the fridge, pictured at right with bonus cat. Not all the cards are Eurasian robins or blue tits, as you can see.

Sending postcards through the mail is a) delightfully analog, b) allows me to make connections with people all over the world, c) scratches a bit of a travel itch, d) makes my own mailbox happy almost every day. (I just wish there were more postcards of Davis available to buy; not everyone likes a handmade card.)