Greetings from...

I went to visit my parents in Connecticut this past weekend, and enjoyed helping Dad with the deck he's building, hanging out in the more pastoral setting, and watching out for the big black bear that has made a couple appearances recently (s/he did not stop by).

We also went to visit Grandma up in Moosup. My great-grandmother's old house is next door, and although she passed away a number of years ago, the family is still working to go through the things she accumulated in her small home over the years. She was a bit of a pack rat, and there's a lot of stuff. My mom and her sister Liisa were going through things again this weekend, and I grabbed some of the old pictures they had found and looked through them with Grandma. She grew up in Finland, so some of the photos were taken there -- even one of the family posing on their cross-country skis, which is how she got to school in the winter. Very cool.

Anyway, getting to the impetus for my blog post: After coming to America, my great-grandparents worked in the household of the Reynolds family (of Reynolds Aluminum fame) for many years. The family had homes in several places, and my grandmother and grandfather would often travel with them. Among the many photos of them posing on the grounds of the homes, there were also postcards they had purchased when accompanying the family on vacation. I asked to take a couple of the postcards with me, and they're pretty awesome:





They're not just postcards, but actually little folders that the recipient opens up to see an accordion of painted images of the place:


The postcard for the "romantically located" cities of Miami and Miami Beach is copyright 1946. No date on the card from Havana -- "where beautiful homes are placed in tropical settings of languorous loveliness" -- but before Castro, in any case.