Who is this for?

Last evening after dinner with a friend in Boston, I went back to the studio I'd rented for the night in the Theatre District right off Boston Common- the oldest common in the US.

The past week and a half has been a trip through time and place with family and friends, and I won't go into the details here, but the common thread among all experiences was connection. When I got back to my tiny suite, I had a task: My brother's partner had handed me a small box of items she'd collected from the stuff my parents had that has been in storage in the garage. Inside was a thick stack of postcards I'd sent to one or the other over the past couple decades. My task was to read through them all and then say goodbye.

When my friend asked what I was up to for the evening, I told her, and her response was to ask why I was not going to keep the postcards? "After me, where else would they go? I wrote them to Mom and Dad. They are not mine to keep."

In conversation a few days earlier with my cousin who is 9 days my junior, I'd disclosed that I think I am less sentimental than some people. We had been talking about how we both tend to live in the moment, day to day, and we are OK with that. I don't pine for the past or worry- too much- about the future. In fact, I don't think I worry about the future for myself at all these days, though I do worry about the future for our young people, and the world in general.

Last evening over dinner, my friend and I asked each other what one thing we might have done differently in our lives, given 20-20 hindsight. We realized that we are OK with what we have done, the decisions we have made, in part because those helped make us who we are, where we are, now.

I read through the postcards: Chicago, Denver, Valles Caldera, Milan, Siena, Boca Grande, Durango, Encampment, LA and so on. I stopped at one of my mother's mailing addresses, trying to stir up an image of the place she lived at that time, and realized it was during a period I was not traveling back east much, if at all, to the people and place with which I "grew up." I had lamented not being in touch more, and gushed about being in touch more, depending on the year, on some of the postcards. I saved one on which I told my mother how glad I was that we had established a connecting in my adult life. The postcards to her were mostly about flowers, gardens, birds, and to my father, landscape, geography, and to both, history.

This morning before leaving the studio, I drank a mediocre cup of coffee, thanked my parents, and said goodbye to the postcards, placing them gently in the little wastebasket next to the desk where my stuffed walrus sat waiting to get to the airport and fly home.