Cards, 2022

I wrote the last of my cards this afternoon, at the kitchen table, with the radio on and a stack of stamps that I underestimated, as I do every year.

Seventy-one this year. That's more than usual, and I know why. After September there were a lot of people I wanted to write to who used to be twenty feet away. Most of them got a card with a real letter folded inside, because a card alone is a receipt, as my mother says, and they deserved more than a receipt.

The list, roughly. My mother, first, as always, though I'll see her in a week. Kristin's family in Minneapolis, with a separate card for each kid, because they've informed me they each want their own envelope. Priya, whose card I'll leave on her desk on Tuesday because we both enjoy the pretense that we don't see each other every day. Old friends from college. Two former teachers. A cousin in Wisconsin I've met three times.

And strangers, or people who started as strangers. A few people still write to me every year about a quest I wrote in 2019, about a man looking for his brother's grave. Three letters came this year. One was from a woman whose brother died in the spring, who said she'd played it again and it helped, and I sat with that one for a long time before I answered it. Everyone who writes gets a card. I don't think I'll ever stop being astonished that anyone writes at all.

The first card to arrive this year came from Ohio, a cardinal on snow, as it has been every December for six years. I've put it on the windowsill where I can see it from the table.

My mother's rule is that cards go out by the eighteenth, so that they arrive before Christmas even if the post office is having a bad week. I made it, just. The last ones go in the box on the corner tonight.

Who's the one person you'd still write to even if nobody wrote back?