The Best Souvenir We Bring Home

We are not big souvenir people, with two happy exceptions. A magnet comes home from every destination, and our refrigerator has slowly turned into a map of everywhere we've been. And a postcard comes home for each of the boys. The magnets are the fun part, a running collection the kids love to add to. But the postcards are the ones I treasure, because a magnet remembers a place, and a postcard, the way we use it, remembers a kid.

The postcard isn't really a souvenir, though. What's written on the back is.

When we get home, I sit down and write each boy his own postcard about the trip we just took. Not a summary of where we went, but a note to him. What we did, and, more than that, something fun or silly or significant that he did, said, or learned while we were there. It might be a food one of them refused all week and then loved on the very last day. A new word that came home with us. A morning one of them was braver than we expected, or a joke that got repeated until it stopped being funny and became a family saying. Small things. The things I know I will otherwise forget.

There is something right about the postcard itself, too. The front is a picture of the place we actually stood, pulled from a rack in that place, and it costs about a dollar. You can find one almost anywhere in the world, which means the ritual never depends on tracking down the perfect gift. Every trip, no matter how small, comes home with one.

Writing them has quietly become my own way of ending a trip. Once the bags are unpacked and the first load of laundry is going, I sit for a few minutes and put the trip into words while it is all still fresh, before the ordinary week swallows it up. It is a small ceremony that says: this happened, it mattered, here is the piece of it worth keeping.

Each boy has a key ring where his postcards live, one added after every trip. Over the years they have become a little stack you can flip through, a flip-book of their childhood told one place at a time. Someday the rings will be theirs to keep.

And here is the part I did not see coming. It is already fun, even now, to sit and read back through them. A postcard from a trip only a couple of years ago will describe a version of Preston or Avery I had half-forgotten, the boy he was at two, at three, before the current version quietly replaced him. The place we visited turns out to be almost beside the point. What the postcard really preserves is the season of life we were in when we went. Who they were. Who we were.

That is the thing about traveling with kids this young. People love to ask why we bother when the boys won't remember it. But we will. And a one-dollar postcard, written at the kitchen table the morning after we land, holds something the magnets never can: the boy himself, exactly as he was that year. The magnets map where we have been. The postcards keep who our boys were while we were there. It is the best souvenir we have ever found, and it was very nearly free.