postage stamps

My first semester at Washington State University, I met up with some fellow residents of the Grad Center every Friday after classes for a glass of wine, some food and fun. Someone might play guitar. We’d bring trinkets to auction for petty cash toward the next week’s event.

One of the women exchanged letters with friends around the world. She’d snip the cancelled stamps off the thin airmail envelopes and bring them to the ‘Prefunction’ as it was called. They were my favorite auction item - I would buy them for a handful of nickels and dimes. To have something tangible from distant places was fascinating. But what really appealed to me were the designs on the stamps. Flowers, portraits, slogans in foreign alphabets - I was purchasing tiny squares, triangles and rectangles of art. Bringing them home to my room brought me a bit of glee, as though they were treasures. That was the start of a lifelong love of postage stamps.