Postcard gallery: Croatia, sand castles, New Zealand, Edgar Allan Poe

All kinds of pen-and-paper awesomeness have been showing up in my mailbox of late. In fact, I now get more letters and postcards than I do blog comments—which is absolutely wonderful. Old-school handwritten correspondence for the win. And it bears repeating: these letters and postcards convey a specific sense of personality and sense of place and general warmth that e-mails and tweets and text messages never can.

A partial sampling from the last couple of weeks:

Clockwise from upper left:

• Edgar Allan Poe looking handsome-but-sad, from Lee (see below for his note on the back).
• Aerogram (!) from Mike Barish.
• Plitvička Jezera, Croatia from Shirley.
• Handmade map aerogram (!!) from Susie in New Zealand (close-up below).
• How To Build a Sandcastle group postcard from my parents, uncle, and cousins, writing from the Jersey shore (the cool, classy kind, not the MTV kind).* 
• Rannoch Moor, Scotland postcard from … I don’t know who. Given the location of the scene on the front of the card, I’m going to guess it’s from my friend DS in Glasgow (if so: cheers, mate!). See below for the hilarious note on the reverse side.
• Arches National Park (Utah) postcard from Eva Holland.

* NOTE: Group postcards are a family tradition and often include greetings from waiters, newly-met friends, and random passersby. Each line is in new handwriting, the sentences getting more compressed toward the bottom as everyone squeezes in, correspondence as clown car. It makes for an interesting, telling artifact of a particular moment of time, showing not just where you were but who was with you and who had what to say about that place and that moment.

A few close-ups:

Yes, Lee. We'll be going to the State Fair and watching the Twins play outdoors
--I asked them to move back outside just so that we could do things the old-fashioned
way when you came to visit.

Seriously, this is a sweet envelope--it's made from a map of the Caribbean. 

It's good to keep those writing fingers in shape now and then.

Thanks, all, for joining the Campaign of Awesome People Bringing Back the Handwritten Letter (CAPBBHL—totally catchy, right?). If I have your address, my own postcard to you should be arriving shortly.

And if anyone else wants to join the CAPBBHL cause, my address is right over there in the sidebar. à

Write on.