Postcards from the past

by Martha Münder (Germany)

I didn't expect to find Germany

Feeling nostalgic on a slow Sunday morning, I was looking through my old photos and found a stack of postcards from my mother. I didn´t even remember keeping them all, but here they were: Memories from all the different places she had been to, the only thing they have in common is my mother´s unmistakable handwriting: legibly and yet poetically curved. Just like her: a rooted woman with a free spirit. After our family did a round-the-world-trip in 1994/95 visiting the Cook Islands, Hawaii, New Zealand, Canada and the USA, my Mom didn´t travel as far in her last years, but rather spent time exploring Germany and Europe. And from all of these different locations she would send me a postcard with her thoughts. One of them shows a village in the vineyards and she tells me how she hiked to a castle where a view of Strasbourg revealed itself. Another one shows the river Mosel and she reminds me that we went there together in my childhood, tells me that she rode her bike for 60 kilometers in the sun and enjoyed a glass of riesling afterwards. After losing my handwritten travel journal on a boat that brought me from Thailand to Laos on the Mekong river, my further travels in Asia were documented by video phone calls, pictures on Instagram and digital messages on Whatsapp. I can´t help but feel melancholic when holding these old postcards in my hands, that at some point in the past were held and written on by her hands. My decision for the last years has been to travel the world on my own, experiencing the wide range of emotions by myself that come with being alone far away from home. From almost getting crushed and panicking on a train in Sri Lanka and sharing a 90cm mattress in a night bus in Cambodia with a stranger, to pure joy while swimming with dolphins in Bali and crying in the Cambodian jungle because of spiders the size of my hand crawling in my bed. I didn't expect to find so much comfort in these old postcards. They revealed enlightenment about a person I thought I knew well. They include wisdom, guidance and advice that I didn´t quite comprehend when reading them in the past. I never realized how much attention my mother gave to details. How much joy she could find in the most simple things and how keen she was to share all of this with me. Her postcards are like letters, short descriptions of the events of the journey mixed with personal feelings and thoughts. And all of them include words of appreciation and love for me: how proud she is of me, asking how my last move went, wondering how I liked the book she sent me, how much she admires my studying and hard-working, how she is looking forward to seeing me soon. The constant change of recipient addresses written on the cards also reveal in how many different places I have tried to create a home in the last ten years: dorms, shared flats, various single apartments in numerous cities. My mother didn't get the chance to send a postcard to my current address because three years ago her life journey ended in the place she loved the most: a room in her house with a view of the roses in her garden in Hamburg. One of these cards has a picture of a man on it, walking through sand, creating a path where there was none before. The card is undated and doesn´t even have a stamp on it. On the back, she asks me which way I will be choosing to go and that she hopes I can use the power that lies inside me. On this Sunday morning, it was almost scary to reread these words because I am at the biggest crossroad in my life right now, having quit my job, wanting to leap into the unknown but not really knowing in which direction to go, which path to chose or how to create a new one. The words unexpectedly found their way back to me in the most vulnerable and important moment.