https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437121
Postcard Stories are stories actually written on postcards, most from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, usually on both sides of the postcard. The date shown with the story, is the date on the postcard when I wrote it. I process the story, and the postcard is eventually mailed – sometimes a year or more later – and when I mail the postcard, I send via email a copy of the processed story to the recipient so they can actually read the story. I usually ask them to first try to read the postcard, but…
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The Four Trees
Second Granddaughter – 01/10/23
…and then when winter comes, the color falls from the trees and everything becomes tangled masses of blacks and purples in the lingering mists of the morning, and the perceived coldness of the river’s waters begin to touch the soul and heart, not like death, but as a deepening chill within that makes one yearn for the warmth and new life of spring. A chill hard to dispel, for it is not a function of degrees, but of an innate fear that the winter will last forever, a forever that despairs of feeling the warmth of the sun again, that fears a world of unending hopelessness, not a world of ice and snow, but just of cold and bleakness. A world without warmth, of the sun, of light, of…life. And yet as she walked along the path along the riverbank, her mind and her soul rejected the image her sadness conjured and fashioned from the winter scene and the coldness all around her for, no, it was not the harbinger of the tomb, no, it was the natural rhythm of nature, yes, of life, for winter follows autumn, and spring will come again after winter, at some point in time, on someday, regardless of how bitter and cold and bleak and dark the winter had become, or how long the nights seem to be, for storm clouds, yes, they pass and the sun will rise again, and spring and new life will once bless again the land. Ah, she knew these things and yet, when…her love left her for another, how deeply the winter had descended into her soul, but now, even still in the bleakness of a cold winter day, because she knew spring would come, she knew this, she believed this, yes, she knew she would survive this winter of her soul to again know the hope and life that will come with the next spring of nature and her soul.
You are an amazing writer, Chris. What a treasured postcard on the rhythms of life and hope.