POSTCARDS FROM THE PAST

J. R.Willis was a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution who migrated to the western United States and set up a photography studio in Gallup, New Mexico, during the mid 20th century. His photographs of the landscapes there look like paintings, and he supplied them for postcards published back in the 1940s, some of which I own because my mother collected these beautiful cards during a trip West with my family in 1946. I keep them in a small black notebook, and on wintry days, like this morning, I take them out and revisit the desert, thinking of warmer days.

My mother appreciated fine art and recognized that Willis wasn’t just someone who snapped a photograph and sold it to a postcard company in Chicago to make a few dollars. He was a notable artist. I have several of Willis’s postcards that she collected and kept in an old red purse that I discovered after her death. Although the cards may be worth money as genuine “collectibles,” I wouldn’t part with them for big dollars.

On gray winter days, I revisit the postcards and travel to Arizona, New Mexico, and California, making the trip that my mother, Dorothy Marquart, regarded as the high-point of her life following WWII. She loved landscape paintings on postcards and newspapers she collected in small towns of the West, including one of Copperas Cove, Texas that she kept for years and a younger brother destroyed. We made many stops in a bright blue Ford that fumed through the West so she could collect the cards and newspapers, but we children enjoyed the hiatus from constant travel—day and night—for two months!

Another collectible was a postcard featuring Twenty-Nine Palms in Palm Springs, California, the work of Stephen Willard. Willard was recognized as a noteworthy artist by Curt Teich, producer of postcards during the 20th century. Willard’s vintage photographs, postcards, and 16,000 items are featured in the Palm Springs Desert Museum. Like many western photographers, he spent summers in the mountains and winters in the desert.

I don’t often include poems within my blogs because I revise them frequently. Besides, every spontaneous poetic thought that enters my mind doesn't deserve publication. This is the snippet I wrote when I viewed the postcards a while ago, and I have returned to work on it again and again. It’s one for Dorothy.

DESERT MEMORIES

If you go too far into memory

you run into shadows,

places where sun rays

have been harsh,

absent of connection and variance.

But the air of too much winter

points you toward barrel cacti,

latticed spines diffusing sun rays,

organ pipes, like you,

struggling for life,

long stretches without oasis.