Seventeen Postcards
When I was a kid, birthdays at my grandma’s house were always simple.
No party hats or big boxes wrapped in shiny paper. Just one thing: an old, faded postcard she’d hand to me with a quiet smile.
Every year, it was the same. A vintage image—sometimes a lighthouse, sometimes a mountain or a dusty road—and a few lines scrawled on the back in her soft, looping handwriting.
As a child, I didn’t get it.
No toys? No cake coupons?
Just another weird postcard from Granny Elizabeth.
I’d force a polite thank-you and move on.
She passed when I was 17.
Two decades later, during a visit to my childhood home, I found an old jar tucked away at the back of her closet. Inside were all seventeen of those postcards, carefully stacked and wrapped in twine.
I sat down, opened the jar, and began to read.
That’s when everything changed.
Each postcard held a poem.
Not just any poem—but a reflection of that year of my life.
A memory only she would remember. A feeling I hadn’t realized she noticed.
Words meant not just for me then, but for who I would become.
Some lines captured my stubborn curiosity at age six.
Others held gentle warnings about the choices I’d face in my teens.
One talked about forgiveness.
Another whispered something about grief—and how it never really goes away, but softens if you let it.
She hadn’t forgotten to buy me gifts.
She had been writing them, year after year, in plain sight.
And I, too young to understand, missed the magic every time.
I brought the postcards home and placed them in frames on my wall. Now, they speak to me in ways no other gifts ever have.
They are my grandmother’s voice, reaching across time.
To Granny Elizabeth:
I didn’t know you were writing a map.
But I’m following it now.
And I carry your words like compass needles pointing home.
Thank you—for everything I didn’t see until I was ready.
I love you more than I ever said out loud.
The Quiet Legacy
In a world that measures gifts by price tags and packages, my grandmother gave me something far more enduring: her quiet presence, her watchful love, and her wisdom wrapped in rhymes.
Seventeen postcards.
Seventeen invisible threads tying me back to the one person who always saw me—even when I didn’t see myself.
That jar?
It wasn’t just full of paper.
It was full of her.