The Wander Postcard Project: A Traveler’s Canon

posted by Hatty

Did I ever mention that wanderlust is my favorite English word?

Frankly, I’m not quite sure what the website does. But as someone who utterly believes in the life-changing magic of traveling, it’s hard to not share a project about creating postcards on the theme of everywhere and nowhere at once.

Where do YOU want to be in four weeks?

onwander:

We asked some of our favorite illustrators to imagine a postcard from everywhere and nowhere at once. We’re blown away by the results, which we’ll be sharing every day on this blog. We hope you will be too. 

Collect, pin, share, and reblog your favorites. They’re also available to download as high-res iPad or iPhone wallpaper. Don’t be shy, take one for the road.

ode to the house i remember as the one where i lived right after my aunt had died

posted by Hatty

I remember the summer I came home after freshmen year. It was right after Hurricane Katrina had hit, months after my aunt passed away of heart attack. My parents had moved immediately to house the look after my two newly orphaned cousins.  

The living room was spacious with a real fireplace and hardwood floor, enough room for two sets of couches. We held a party here once, Christmas/housewarming/birthday party for Hannah. My mom said that losing aunt shouldn’t rob Hannah of her celebration. Her birthday was two days before Christmas. we spent more than two hundred dollars buying fancy ornaments at Macy’s, per Hannah’s request. Handmade glass, colored orbs, beads and angel figurines. I got so upset with the selfishness, the extravagant planning my mom had never done for me. She invited friends for a feast and a gift exchange. We all sat in a circle in that huge living room on a sumptuous carpet, opening presents: a box of Ferrero Rocher, stuffed animals and coffee mugs. What we ate, I don’t remember. People left early, their gifts sitting unwrapped in the living room.

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An Ambivalent Retreat

posted by Emily

We stutter down the side of a mountain — I in my unbroken boots and he in his twenty years of this — picking through dirt with the soles of our shoes and kicking rocks. He strides like nothing and I swat with domestic palms till they are streaked with stinging nettle.

Professor wheedled the class into believing that our collegiate cloister was making us soft. Our enclosure in these departmentsapartmentscompartments, was ebbing us unnatural, he said. And surely enough, we were all feeling suffocated, sooner or later resenting fluorescent lighting and campus Panini. So he piled us into a rental van and started down 880, watching us droop into prompt sleep, so hungry for it.

I woke up and found myself at the foot of a mountain. Then, I gorged myself on pork rinds and beer — plodding later into smoke steeped dreams of Sasquatch and The Great Outdoors. Waking in a tent the next morning, covered in the film of others’ sleep breath, my teeth tasted like a gas station and ached for a good brushing. But in climbing the mountain, I only tasted swollen lungs, caulked in urban atrophy, soured by the reality of exercise.

Setting back, we scaled switchbacks and counted steps, hands stinging, feet aching, back dripping, pissed. Stuttering down the side of a mountain. I in my unbroken boots and professor in his twenty years of this.

He tells me the story of breaking his clavicle on rained English pavement, the kindness of a passing mini-van. Tucked that night neither into chamomile nor whiskey. Instead 2 cold cans of beer and the hospital.

Another day on a train in Istanbul with his daughter, contemplating whether or not to buy a ticket deeper into Asia minor. Their ambivalent retreat —

The back country of Eastern Canada, the frittered diaspora of Toronto. Hoards of failed Chinese and Jamaican miners, breeding through gold-less centuries: King Crab buffets and the indictment of Chinese sausages by Canadian border patrols.

The trailhead appears, and waiting nearby is the rental van in which I will surely fall asleep, and wake up into normalcy. Suddenly, an ambivalent retreat.