Finally a Beautiful Stamp!

If you're close to my age or older you might remember when your house was filled with books, recipe books, phone books, comic books, address books, cameras with rolls of film, photo albums, agendas, letters, postcards, boxes of maps, travel brochures, dictionaries, stacks of records, cassette tapes, VHS tapes, CD towers, telephones plugged into the wall, rows of National Geographic magazines, and stacks of newspapers. But now, our phones, and tablets have rid us all those things, and sometimes I seriously miss them, though not the clutter. Well, as you know, if there's one thing I want to keep circling around it's letters, postcards and stamps.

Sitting down in a coffee shop or at my kitchen table with the kid, I close my eyes and wait to see inside my mind who is coming to join me. Sometimes, it's a pile of kids from back in the hood, other times it's my mother or my oldest friend. Some of my letters are long with doodles, or inspired by something funny I find out there in the city like a ridiculous advertisement. Some are postcards I've made myself or bought in the rare places where stationary exists in Rio.
I've always thought that the stamp is like the cherry on top of your banana split message. It's the last beautiful thing you get to lick on to salute the official send off of your postcard, "Good luck! Hope you make it there!" Boringly for the last year and a half, the post offices have only given me the same three stamps, none of which are particularly interesting. Until, last week. I was traveling to a "get-me-out-of-this-soccer-crazed-city" retreat to the mountains, bringing my posting supplies with me knowing someone would probably come "sit with me" in the countryside. And they did. My stack of cards and letters in hand, I walked into town to scope out the post office, a one-person operation in a tiny room and no line-up. Imagine my delight when the post-lady handed me this beautiful stamp!

Finally, a real maraschino cherry!

My writing table in the mountains with the "Buriti" trees.