The beginning of my postcard album is rather eclectic - perhaps because I bought my first postcard at eight years old because I thought it was pretty with no clear idea of where I really was. The bright Blue Ridge Parkway postcard of autumn colors and a winding road didn’t seem to resemble the actual Blue Ridge Parkway we had traveled in summertime; I think I suggested to my parents that we go the place on the postcard someday.

The Blue Ridge Parkway is followed by a rocket ship taking off, a Smithsonian parking pass, and another awkwardly trimmed Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum postcard. This is followed by several from Thailand, one of which has a little paper figure taped to it, his left arm and leg folded awkwardly over the rest of him. Flat Stanley, in his fabulously multicolored shirt, had done the traveling, not me!

It took me several years to connect postcards with the significance of the places themselves. I would come away from various beaches with five or six postcards because they were pretty and I could not resign myself to choosing one.

When I flip through the album, I cannot pinpoint a significant postcard of transformation, in which I suddenly collected them not just because they were lovely to look at, but to capture the suggestion of the place itself and all that had happened. That came gradually, but it was surely there when I had the opportunity to travel to the Balkans for a college honors program. To flip through those carefully chosen postcards is to call forth a train of thought, a detail of a place, of a story I heard. It is the link between the very real then and the faraway now.

I come away from places with tangible things - postcards, journal entries, other sorts of souvenirs. But these are only valuable in reference to what is intangible. A place is more than something "fun" or "unique" to experience. A place is something alive with people, a culture and a history. The intangible thing is the impression that such places leave, the moment you discover just how much there is outside of your own world. You come back with a microcosm in your head of the new world you experienced; that is when tangible things like postcards become effective in finding the concrete things. I'm finding this to be true as I look through my postcards, calling forth some memories and stories with significance that I am just beginning to discover.

I am beginning the process of writing through the places I've been, because for me, to write through something to is to make sense of it. But to write through something I must remember it, and to remember it, I return to my old friends, my postcards. I wouldn't have imagined, when I was eight, how much more they would be than pretty pictures.