We took the train into the city on a cold Friday morning. Union Station was gothic, beautiful and quiet in the early hours of the day. I sipped hot coffee and the children shared a cinnamon sugar pretzel in the white tiled food court. We walked across the street and into the National Postal Museum inside the Old City Post Office.
We spent the next two hours moving back and forth through two hundred years of history. I lost myself in lives lived and lost, my mind filled with their stories. The international stamp collection is stored in a wide wall of skinny vertical display cases, and we thrilled to the variety of sizes, shapes and colors. In a gift shop bin my son found a fat and heavy plastic bag labeled “OVER 500 STAMPS FROM ALL COUNTRIES INSIDE!!” His eyes were bright with excitement so I had no choice but spend the $7US. He held the bag tightly in both hands during the entire train ride home.
He sat down at their work table, made a hole in the bag and turned it upside down.. We watched the stamps spill out of that hole, big stamps, small stamps, all colors and countries and soon the pile covered much of the table. Over the next two hours we sorted stamps together, found countries on our world map, talked about how countries sometimes just dissolve and form new countries, and made many little piles all over the table. We each picked our favorite stamps from the whole lot–how lovely is the butterfly and those mushrooms?
The next day while he was at a friend’s house I sewed a stamp pile organizer of sorts, a temporary place to keep his piles sorted and visible until we devise a more permanent way to display his new (instant) collection. While the stamp holder isn’t as colorful as the last organizer I made, the green makes a lovely billiard-table-ish background for his treasures.
