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| Bittersweet 3.5 x 5.25" swatch cut from a poster (not painted by me) to create a postcard |
The opening lines of the message on the card above read as follows:
Sunday 11/1/2015
Hi Mack,
Bittersweet: I'd set up this postcard w/ stamp and address to take w/ me on vaca to VA/WV to send to Muth way back 100 years ago in early Oct. Then I forgot to pack it … and now I've updated the address label and I'm writing to you instead of Muth—sad not to be writing to Muth, glad to be writing to you.
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For a year or two preceding my mom's death in October 2015, I wrote postcards to her regularly. The written word, in small doses, allowed for sweet and successful connection and communication as her dementia advanced.
The postcard above became a transition postcard following her death, marking the turning point at which I began painting postcards for my dad so he'd receive personal mail—by post, at the end of his driveway, in his roadside mailbox—as he lived by himself 150 miles away from his nearest daughters in the home he and my mom had previously shared. I wrote several times a month, sending the cards between in-person visits with him in Maine.
He kept all the accumulating cards on the small table beside the love seat in the dining room niche that we referred to as Narcolepsy Nook. As the stack of cards grew higher, I once offered to give him a box I had as a container. "No," he replied. "Thank you, but I like them just the way they are, in a stack."
When he died this year, five and a half years after my mom, I took that stack of postcards into my own keeping. Now, as 2021 draws closer to its end, I am continuing my tradition of recent years of making a wall calendar of my art to give as presents and offer for sale—this time featuring a dozen of my Postcards to Mack, this time using phrases extracted verbatim from the postcards to title them, this time creating the calendar at my desk at home and not in front of the wood stove in Maine with my dad in the chair beside me.
'Tis a bittersweet labor of love.
