remember these postcards

about a week ago, friend Yvonne, who lives in Berlin and has for the last two months or so been patiently sending me German messages on facebook to help me practice, thought it would be fun to test my still very wobbly language skills in a totally different medium. she suggested sending a postcard to her daughter.

so I pulled my box of correspondence accoutrements (postcards, envelopes, stationery, pens, stamps, address booklets, you know) out of the closet and dug around for a nice postcard. I had a few homemade ones. a few from England. a few from I don't remember where. and a few from Canada, with lovely mountains on them. I don't live anywhere near any mountains these days, but I have been craving them for the past few weeks.

remember those few (too few) times you visited Waterton Lakes National Park? remember that cabin-looking chapel where you sang hymn #35? surely you remember feeling, so suddenly and deep, like the text meant you just as much as it meant any steep, looming stretch of rocky, tree-strewn landscape. you remember. you remember the clouds brushing the feet of those majestic southern-Alberta slopes, locking them up in a horizon beyond the gaze of earth-bound mortals. you remember that most because you have photographs of it.

those Canadian rockies are not the mountains I know best, but I guess they are the ones I have the most postcards featuring. I chose this one to write on for Yvonne's little girl Malin.

postcards are such a lovely invention. I am glad somebody (Theodore Hook, they say it was) thought of them. I'm glad they still exist.

this here is the message I scrawled to the young Malin, whom Yvonne tells me has been collecting postcards and is quite proud of the wall of cards she has accumulated so far. I hope mine arrives without any trouble.

and I hope mein Deutsch is intelligible. my pen is not used to adding in umlauts, nor to capitalizing nouns.