During my childhood, Grandma Fern’s postcard collection was stored in a shoebox in our parent’s bedroom closet. Now and then, Mom would take the box down so we could admire the beautiful cards, collected from about 1900 to the 1940s, sorting them into piles by birthday and holiday – Christmas, Valentine’s, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Easter, New Year’s, and Halloween.
Somewhere along the way, I put part of the collection in an album for a 4-H project. After that, the album and the shoebox lived in the same closet until Mom moved to Boone, where they lived in a different closet and eventually in a safety deposit box at the bank.
A few weekends ago, my sibs and I divided the postcards among us as keepsakes for our children. An appraiser told my sister that some of them are quite valuable – the ones with Santas and Kewpie dolls and Halloween greetings – and I am sure they are. But for me, their value lies in the link they create, binding my children to my father’s mother, the well-loved woman who collected them for decades and died a year before I was born.
One postcard is written in Grandpa Cy’s hand. He sent it to his wife and only child, Grandma Fern and my dad, while on a fishing trip in Park Rapids, Minnesota. Two cards remind me of my farmer son – one showing a 1908 gristmill owned by an ancestor and another from the Farmers Cooperative Produce Company in Des Moines urging farmers to increase their cream checks. One, with little girls wearing wooden shoes and traditional Dutch dress, makes me think of my daughter at college in a very Dutch town.
Will I let these treasures live in a shoebox for another hundred years? No. I plan to display some of them, carefully matted and framed, on the walls of our old farmhouse. Others will be framed gifts to my children, their spouses, and to grandchildren someday, with a little story about beside each one. It’s the least I can do with such valuable gifts.
Thank you, Grandma Fern, for leaving a legacy to connect my children and their descendants to your life.
