Cards

I finished my cards on Friday night and mailed them yesterday, which is late for me, and in a year when the post office is as far behind as it is, probably too late for some of them. I've made my peace with that. A card that arrives in January still arrives.

The list was longer this year. I keep it in the back of my notebook, and every year I copy it forward and add and cross off. Usually it's about sixty names. This year it was eighty-three. I didn't plan that. It happened one name at a time, through the spring and summer, and when I sat down to copy the list I found it had grown while I wasn't watching.

Some of the new names are people from the letters. The retired mail carrier in Oregon, whose card I chose with care because he will have opinions about the stamp. A woman in Texas who wrote to me last year about her twin and has written every couple of months since. Three former colleagues I hadn't spoken to in years until one of us sent a letter in April. A man from my first job, whose father died in September in the care home he couldn't visit. His card took me the longest. I wrote three versions and sent the shortest.

Some are people I'd see every week in a normal year and haven't seen once since March. Priya. The two writers I sat between for five years. Owen, who has never sent a card in his life, and who will get one anyway, because I am my mother's daughter.

And there are the ones that don't change. My mother's cousins. Kristin and her family, with a separate card for each of the kids, because they're old enough now to notice. My mother herself, who will get hers at the same time she's sending me mine, and who will tell me on the phone that I put the stamp on crooked.

Writing eighty-three cards by hand took four evenings. I didn't mind. This year it felt less like an obligation and more like taking attendance: a way of checking, one name at a time, that everyone I care about is still there. Most of them are. I'm grateful for that in a way I've never been before.