Luck and tiny pieces of paper

Two things I dearly love: 3x5 cards and writing things by hand. I have always loved writing things by hand, all the way back to the days of fat pencils and newsprint with blue and pink lines. You draw letters and they make words! What is better than words? Words are excellent. Words are better than pate, better than shiraz. Words are even better than cats.

But I digress.

I trace my love of 3x5 cards to Grandmom. She subscribed to this thing called Contest Newsletter: it had lists of hundreds of contests: prizes, due dates, and how to enter. Almost invariably, the entry was either a 3x5 card or a 3x5 piece of paper with one's name and address.

So when we went to visit, she would put us to work, writing her name and address on cards and slips of paper: piles of Bic ballpoint pens, the scent of paste ink (I hate to write with ballpoints, but I love the scent of paste ink), faint scratching, the crinkle of paper or the the shuffle of card stock. We would use the little sponges in glass dishes from the post office to wet envelopes and stamps, swiping them carefully. My fingers would get sticky. Remember having to lick envelopes and stamps? The minty, library-paste flavor of the glue?

(Of course I tasted library paste. They told us that many kids eat library paste and that we should not, no matter how good it tastes. I had to try it to make sure that I would not be tempted in the future. I just had a very small lick.)

She won so much stuff that it was even worth it to spend that small fortune on stamps: a diamond ring, a fair pile of money, mountains of cookware (I eventually inherited an electric wok that I wore out), a fake rose made out of---wood chips?---that fascinated me, and $200 worth of Dukes of Hazzard stuff that ended up with my sister, including the puffiest sleeping bag imaginable, with Bo and Luke's faces on it.

I still happily spending my afternoon scribbling on small cards. Even addresses would be enough.

And I would give teeth to have one with Grandmom's address on it, in her handwriting.