Notecard Collection: One

She began this collection at age thirteen just after a visit to the Grand Canyon, the family’s first vacation and the principle reason for driving to Arizona. Her first note states that the canyon itself was not visible because of an unexpected snowstorm that filled the whole of what postcards purported to be the largest natural earthly depression in the northern hemisphere with clouds. Though unusually objective prose for a thirteen year old, rereading it just now reminds me that she was rather concerned at the time that the river at the bottom had also been concocted by novelists and imaginative amateur geologists, because she couldn’t see it for the clouds. These are my words, not hers. Hers were less to the point.

“Dear Virginia,” she wrote. “You’d believe this because it’s rare and unbelievable. We drove 750 miles to the Grand Canyon only to learn firsthand that both the adjective and its pretty noun have lost their credibility. Wouldn’t you know it, the whole of the Canyon was stuffed with down! Were I less of a Peter, or if you had been here to extend me your hand, I may have headed off across that big feather bed, found a soft spot in the middle somewhere, covered myself in a layer of snowflakes—because it may as well have been snowing as far as the beguiled weathermen were concerned—and taken a quick nap. But as it turned out, I was in shorts, a young and earnest believer in the words of my parents’ travel book, that the sun over Arizona is as diligent and determined as the Colorado River.”