Dear Readers,

In my post-retirement bliss, I am going through drawers and finding greeting cards and notes that I saved.  They still bring a smile to my face and they make me wince thinking of the cards and notes that I’ve thrown away over the years when trying to declutter.  Believe me, by the time you’re sixty-five and you’ve taught school, you’ve received lots of cards and notes.  Now I wish that I’d saved every one.

Then, hey!  Someone else was thinking about cards.  I enjoyed Bruce Jay Smith’s Facebook post in Camden, NJ — Yours and Mine that showed  greeting cards sent and received in Camden in 1938 and he mentioned how it felt to choose a card from that best expressed how he felt.  I recognized that feeling. Thanks, Bruce. His post inspired this blog and it made me think–yes, e-mail cards and Facebook greetings are fun, but it is lovely to get a real card.

I can’t forget the card that my Wiggins College Preparatory Lab School ESL elementary students sent me when I spent a month home with double pneumonia.  I felt like a wet rag. I could barely crawl up the steps to the bathroom.  It hurt to breathe.  I wondered if I was dying.  Books, newspapers, food, the Internet, not even the medicine, nothing seemed to relieve my misery for a minute.  However, the big flowery card with their little signatures made me feel like a human, a loved one! I looked at that card three or four times a day until I went back to work.

Holiday cards!  I love them, too.  All of them. The religious and the secular.  The Madonna and child Christmas cards, the snowman winter season cards,  the menorah Hanukah cards, the mushy red heart Valentine’s Day cards, the flowery Easter cards, the heartfelt Mother’s Day cards, the sporty Father’s Day cards, cards with cornucopias spilling with fruits and vegetables at Thanksgiving–you name it.  I love to send them and I love to receive them.  People grumble about the cost of stamps, but I don’t care because I want someone to have the joy of going to the mailbox and find a handwritten envelope with a card that’s been especially chosen and sent for that person.

So many cards, so little time to buy and send them all!

And notes..  I so regret all the notes that I chucked from school kids.  I kept only a few.  A few friends still send cards with notes and I treasure them.  I regret that I haven’t kept them all.

Hmm.  I’m inspiring myself to send cards this week to surprise friends that I haven’t seen for a long time, but still keep close to my heart.  Do you know someone that you’d like to surprise with a greeting card?  Sentimental, encouraging, funny?  Oh, the funny cards–they’re stupendous.  You’ll have a lot of fun looking at the cards in the humorous section!

Do you keep all your cards and notes?  Was there a card or a note that you received that you’ll never forget?  Let me know.

Love from Marguerite Ferra, Cramer Hill