Last night, I took an unplanned trip down Memory Lane. It was quite a ride!

Every day, I’ve been heroically facing the next shelf, drawer, or cupboard that has to be decluttered, before my son Matthew and I make our big move to Enumclaw, Washington to daughter and son-in-law Susy and Curt’s farm. We plan to take up life grazing amongst their small herd of miniature donkeys. (They can’t vote, of course, but we’re pretty sure they must be Democrats. Otherwise, they’d be elephants.)

The drawer I chose to deal with last night was bulging with every greeting card I’ve received since 2005 when my husband Gene died. Was never sure why I hung onto them, though I finally figured it out last night. They contain a lot of comfort, they do!

In 1970, when our son Mark died, I had discovered an oddball hack when it comes to grief. When somebody sends you those beautiful sympathy cards and Mass cards, spare yourself the pain of reading them. To really appreciate them, put them in a drawer and wait for ten years. Then read them. That’s what I did when both Mark, and then again later when Gene died. Both times, thanks to my earlier cowardice, on finally reading them, I was rewarded – and enveloped in – the gentle, comforting support that was their original intention. And then I could finally let them go.

The experience with the sympathy cards may be why I started saving the happy greeting cards in 2005. Only this time when they came, I did read them, giggled over them, and was genuinely warmed by them. Then without even thinking about it, I stuck each one in the dresser drawer and forgot all about them. Till last night.

If you were one of the senders of those greeting cards, thank you for your affection, humor, and the time you took to choose the perfect card and write the tender or goof-ball message it contained. To say I enjoyed the experience of re-reading them would be a miserable understatement. Let’s just say I was loving every minute of it! You certainly cared to send the very best!

Lots of our old standby tools have quietly disappeared since technology and the internet took over the world, and most of it won’t be missed. Pretty soon, stuff like road maps, ironing our clothes, encyclopedias, Yellow Pages, recipe books – will be as quaint as buggy whips. Some of it might be missed, though. Such as those old-fashioned paper greeting cards. It may be that the convention of sending those sunny, wholesome messages via US Mail will be the next remnant of our past lives.

I still remember when yesterday’s greeting cards like the ones below cost 5 cents each and we paid 3 cents to mail each one.

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Sadly, the paper greeting card business is declining big-time. The big Papyrus greeting card company went bankrupt last year and closed all 254 of its stores. Hallmark closed 16 stores last year. And – ouchie! – if we lose Hallmark, we’ll also lose the great Hallmark Masterpiece Theater on TV.

It’s not that we’re not sending greeting cards though. Seven billion or so were sold last year. Only today, many are digitally created and we fire them off to their recipients via the internet. Or if they are on paper, we can get the computer to snail mail them out for us. Alexa can even choose and mail one for us.

And forget the flowery, sentimental compositions of yore. Here’s a few popular Mom’s Day digital “cards” currently featured on Amazon.com for next weekend’s holiday. The sentiment’s there, but the verbiage isn’t what you’d call “old-fashioned”.

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In case you aren’t completely captivated with the charm of these greetings, you may be comparing them to the near-perfect messages kids always manage to create on their crayoned homemade greetings. On real paper. We can only hope that, thanks to all those heroic elementary school teachers, Mother’s Day greeting “cards” will never become obsolete. Like these, for instance . . .

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There’s one more category of greeting cards that’s important to me and everybody in our family. These cards were never kept in the dresser drawer with the others, but in their own protected storage. My sister Joan concocted extraordinary three-dimensional cards that are unlike any I’ve ever seen anywhere. Here are photos of the fronts of a few of them, but one-dimensional pictures don’t do them justice. You have to FEEL them and handle them, and when you do, you’ll sense the artistry, painstaking attention to detail, and the affection she lavished on each creation. Those cards are in a category all their own, and they will never be discarded by any of us in the family. I hope they will still be available to touch, feel, and enjoy two hundred years from now.

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My little trip down Memory Lane certainly captivated me. It makes me think that however we do it, communicating with each other – whether it’s with a paper greeting card, a digital one, an email, a letter, a visit, a phone call, or via smoke signals – is a two-way gift we each have a share in.

I suppose you may be wondering what I finally did with decluttering the contents of that dresser drawer after I finished re-reading all those cards. When it came time to trash them, I tried, but I couldn’t do it. They didn’t belong in the recycling bin. The internet came to the rescue though. There’s places that want those little treasures. They use parts of the cards in some places like schools, prisons, or rest homes for crafts or to repurpose as new cards and then re-sell. So the front cover of each card sent to me since 2005 is now on its way to:

St. Jude’s Ranch for Children
100 St. Jude Street
Boulder City, Nevada 89005

Someday maybe you’ll stumble across a card you sent that’ll be up for sale once again. If so, buy it! It’ll be a two-time winner, for sure.