The silence before the collapse: that’s what made us laugh. Three kids stack playing cards to make little rooms on the living room floor and then the colorful rectangles barely whisper when they fall down, turning our long minutes of focused concentration into one shared gasp. Dismay and delight mixed together. That’s what I think of when I stand back to look at the temple I’ve just built from old postcards, a fragile monument I’ve balanced on the wooden kitchen table of my house in Maine.
Postcards have been collecting in the attic forever since my grandfather from Finland bought the farm in 1917. I’ve got better things to do of course: a gutter needs fixing, stuff needs sorting, and where is that tax bill anyway? But look at what I’ve built from a shoebox full of postcards! It’s a three-story mouse habitat of bright walls. Like those kids placing the king, the queen, the jack of clubs one by one on their edges, I held my breath to make a card sent from Port Clyde stand just so next to a giant trout strapped to a horse. Lighthouses, windmills, tornadoes. My mother drove between Arizona and Maine for years and plucked postcards from the nearest café to the motel. Her oil engineer brother traveled the world and also collected photo souvenirs. A shoebox fills up and gets tucked up in the attic with the trunk of framed diplomas and old curtains made by my grandmother on her treadle sewing machine. I could be sorting out antiques from junk, but instead I’m doing nothing. Well, I do try to put a small teepee on top of a temple I’ve made from postcards. I lean Greetings from Oklahoma against an Air New Zealand DC-8 taking off and then it all collapses and I laugh and think of times when I didn’t laugh alone.
I do wish my siblings were here to sit at the table and trade impressions of our genetic material, but lives are so busy. Perhaps we’ll never all be in the Maine house at the same time again. Would they see the ghosts of my mother and her mother standing by the Tappan Deluxe gas stove dipping lobsters into a giant steaming pot? They might find the old pitchforks in the barn more interesting, but for me it is these words from wonders witnessed that grip my attention. That postmark from the eldest brother who went to sea with the merchant marine includes the name of his ship. I become discombobulated by piles of Christmas cards written in Finnish, until I find one with a picture of my grandmother standing next to the artist Andrew Wyeth who lived nearby. His big hand rests on her arm tucked under his elbow.
What should I do with these rectangles and their hints of stories tangled together? Stambarg am See at the foot of the Alps. The Apache Trail. The Imperial Sky Motel in Las Cruces like a turquoise and orange set of a ’50s mob movie. Madrid. Bisbee. Gert sends Alaskan brown bears. Pam sends three cats licking their paws. Joyce sends a foggy day in Rhode Island where she says the swimming is warmer than in Maine. Bonnie sends a photo of an orange-robed monk paddling a tiny boat down a river in Thailand. “Thai monks do not cook,” she writes to explain the begging bowl balanced by his knees. There is a card from me sitting at a café in Mexican Water on the rez. “Three Navajo ladies are hobknobbing at the end of the counter: a peaceful sound, sort of like the shoosh of the Agua Fria River,” I wrote to my mother.
The Agua Fria at Badger Springs, I think at the kitchen table in Maine, suddenly homesick for that water running over warm Arizona granite. Last time I took my mother there she was in her 80s and content to sit in the sand under a willow tree while I climbed over boulders and sloshed through warm pools. Later I helped her stand up and brushed sand from her wobbly legs and pulled her hat from her daypack. She picked up her Thermos from where she’d parked it and it left behind a perfect round imprint, a full moon cast from her tea drinking by a gurgling desert stream. It’s another kind of postcard, I suppose, that remembered moon greeting me at this kitchen table, whispering its message from afar, “Wish you were here …”
