Postcards home
Our postcards from Antarctica arrived in today’s mail.
It was quite a challenge to comprehend having written on the back of these picture postcards, stuck postage stamps on them, and dropped them in the mailbox on Port Lockroy in Antarctica a little over three weeks ago, only to find them in the mail basket this morning, on the front doorstep of our Newport home.
Geography often strikes me as more of a beautiful, mystical conundrum than a science or an academic discipline.
I always send myself a postcard—or two or three—when I travel. Sometimes it’s a way of remembering a moment that’s impossible to articulate even to myself. Sometimes it’s to reinforce an insight or a flash of powerful inspiration that I’m afraid to lose in the bustle of a busy itinerary: I’m afraid the butterfly moment will be forgotten or lost in the cracks between the journey and the traveling, between the arrivals and departures and the time spent actually being there. Sometimes I send a postcard because I find a photographic image of the place where I’m staying that represents the place and my experience perfectly, better perhaps than my amateur hand can coax from my camera.
Whatever the reason for taking a few minutes to write those few words on the postcard—Dear Me, Remember this?—to buy the stamp, to ask for directions to the nearest mail box (I love practicing my foreign languages) it’s always worth the time, the effort, the extra steps, the wrong turns on the way to the mail box.
Days or weeks later, when the bags are unpacked but the journey still isn’t, there’s such surprise and joy in the mail basket when the first postcard arrives. I was there. And now I’m here. And this little picture postcard is reconnecting here with there. Days and weeks melt away and all the remembered sounds and sights and smells are bright shining alive again. It’s like soaking a dry sponge in water—everything springs back to life before my eyes. I can relive the travel and continue the journey.
It’s almost as if I haven’t unpacked my bags yet.
