written by Reto Hänny

 

Grandma wiped her hands on the apron, took a shoebox with postcards off the chest, fingered through the postcards ordered in the box as if it were a drawer of a library archive, occasionally pausing longer at one or another, pushing it into its place, taking a closer, inquisitive look at it, maybe even pulling it out of the pile, lifting it towards the light from the dark corner of the box, so that she could distinguish the details, then turning it over, so that she could glance over the address, short greetings, diverse notices and the name of the sender – most of it was stored in her memory, so she needed only a short glance to recall the rest – before a card, for example Aunt Bertha’s America-card, returned into the slot marked in the pile with the forefinger of her left hand.