When my elderly aunts moved from their home to a new retirement facility in September, my father and I were charged with the responsibility of moving their furniture and getting the house ready to sell. It was an arduous task that took more than a month to complete. Among the tasks was cleaning out the basement and going through their storage items. One of the finds was an enormous box filled with my Aunt Ann's collection of postcards - ones she had received from friends abroad or ones she had picked up on her own travels as souvenirs. My aunts had truly travelled the world: Egypt, Greece, England, France, Italy, Spain, the Caribbean, all over the US and Canada, Lebanon, Israel, Mexico... Their friends had obviously travelled too, given the huge assortment of postcards we found, covered in stamps from all over the world.

When my Aunt Ann told me she didn't want the postcards anymore she offered them to me. I jumped at the chance to have them!

I've since framed a selection of the black-and-white ones and mounted them over my desk in my home office. You can see the results below. Many of the postcards are dated from the '50s and '60s. The oldest one received was to my great grandmother, Mary, in 1941 from a relative of hers in Lebanon. These are treasures!

I framed the faces of the black and white postcards in one frame and, beside it, the written-on backs of postcards in the other frame. I like seeing the fancy stamps and all the different styles of handwriting from pepole I never met who wrote to my aunts. One of them is from a member of the Canadian Senate.

Some close-ups of the postcards: from glorious architecture in Russia to a simple motel bedroom in Florida.

Different scrawl from different people from all over the world makes an interesting collage.