The Postcards I Never Wanted
Growing up, I never liked my grandmother’s birthday gifts.
While other kids got toys or money, I got postcards—faded, bent, sometimes boring pictures of beaches or train stations.
At eight, I forced a smile.
At twelve, I frowned.
At fifteen, I rolled my eyes.
At seventeen, the last year she was alive, I barely thanked her before tossing it into a drawer.
She died that winter, quietly in her sleep, like a book closing mid-sentence.
I cried. But I was young, and life pulled me forward.
Twenty years later, I stood in my childhood attic, helping clear the house before it was sold. Under old books and a lavender-scented blanket, I found a glass jar.
Inside were seventeen postcards.
One for every year.
My hands trembled as I turned the first one over.
At the top was a small number: #1.
The day you were born, I held you and promised to protect your heart when the world couldn’t.
I stopped breathing.
I opened another.
#2.
You screamed through your whole party, but I’ve never seen anyone look so powerful covered in cake.
Each card was a memory. A moment. A love note.
She hadn’t given me scraps of paper.
She had given me my story.
I sat on the attic floor and cried—not from grief, but from the shock of realizing I had misunderstood the greatest gift of my life.
She didn’t give me things that would break.
She gave me pieces of her heart.
Now the postcards sit framed on my desk.
They remind me that love doesn’t always arrive in shiny wrapping.
Sometimes it comes quietly, patiently… waiting to be understood.
And every time I pass them, I whisper the words I should have said years ago.
Thank you, Grandma.