Campfyre Stories

… I chronicle the travels of others.

Sort of.

You see, I collect post cards.  This is the only "collection" that I’ve kept for any extended period of time and have been collecting them for over a decade and a half.  The only thing is that I collect postcards that are sent, specifically, to me.  I don’t collect old postcards sent to other people, that would defeat my whole concept.

People have a habit, when they go away (especially to exotic locations) to ask "Can I bring you anything back?"  I always answer with "Send me a postcard."  To me, this is cheap and easy, but not everyone thinks so.  It can be difficult to find a mailbox in an unfamiliar location and buying stamps is something a lot of people, oddly to my thinking, don’t like to do.  But most people do send the postcards, and then are a little surprised at how long it takes for them to arrive.

But, to me, postcards are a fascinating phenomenon.  They never arrive before the person gets home.  It’s like some cosmic postcard rule.  Even the ones that come from halfway around the world and are sent 2 weeks before the sender comes home will arrive the day after they do.  I don’t make the rules, but the postcards follow them.

My collection has personal rules to make it more interesting to me.  The primary one is that they must be postmarked.  It doesn’t have to be from the specific place where they were purchased, but it should be somewhere along your journey.  Sometimes people will send me postcards from their home base as well.  Usually it’s because they found one that made them think of me.  Those are *always* welcome.  I’ve even had postcard swaps with people I knew from message boards, because I knew they could get me places that few people would wind up visiting.  In return, I sent postcards of landmarks in my area with historical facts or personal stories to go along with them.

One of the more interesting aspects, I find, to postcards is what gets written on them.  There is no standard dictate of what *should* be there, and I’ll get varying degrees of depth and detail, and also varying sizes of letters, depending on how much the person wants to say - if anything.

The most amusing postcard I’ve ever received was blank except for the address, which was written in tiny letters.  Upon his return, the friend who sent it to me said that the people in the post office had given him the strangest look, but he wasn’t sure if I wanted anything written on it.  He was worried that might defeat the purpose.  It’s possibly, for that reason, my most unusual postcard in the collection.

Most recently, I received a series of 5 postcards, chronicling a trip a friend of mine took to the west coast.  She and the person she was visiting spent most of their time in the car, driving from point to point and seeing incredible sites.  Each postcard had a different short message on it and I have a feeling she started running out of ideas somewhere along the line because one of them just said "Hi Fyre!  Love Miz"  They ALL made me smile.

Most of the time, they come to my real name.  Every now and again, I’ll get a postcard addressed to FyreGoddess.  Either way, postcards are always well-received and I usually share them (with very few and rare exceptions).

And I always send postcards when _I_ travel, which has been rather rare of late…  and sometimes I send them for the simple cliched reason that a picture is worth a thousand words, with little more than "Thinking of you…" written on the back.

To me, just the simple gesture of a postcard is meaningful, especially in this technology-driven, information highway age.  A postcard requires fewer words than an email and it has that personal touch that few people are familiar with in their communication these days.  I suppose there’s an air of nostalgia for postal mail, but that’s not why I do it.  I do it because I like to get mail and firmly believe that other people also like to get mail.  And postcards are more fun than almost anything else, except maybe packages.