Objects: Stamps

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We’re collectors: stamps, postcards, matchbooks, magnets, the myriad small things that accumulate while traveling. Our far-flung friends often send us photos of treasures they’ve come across, with descriptions of why they caught their eye. Here is one of those found objects.

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It was never cool, as a millennial, to collect stamps. And time just made it lamer actually, especially in the digital age.

“Why do you collect stamps?” 

Because each stamp has so much to say, each stamp brings me closer to far countries that I wish I could journey to myself someday. But to me, each stamp represents a piece of history, a person, a place or a wild animal that I can never learn enough about. I keep each foreign stamp like a hoarder of pocket-size geography.

This stamp in particular showed me that somewhere in the world, there is a parrot that fancies hanging upside down (the Blue-Crowned Hanging Parrot, since you ask), which makes me long for the day I get to see this odd bird with my own eyes.

So hold the email for once. Send a piece of dream so that someone out there can discover something new. Then maybe someday you will be the recipient of an unknown sight from our beautiful world – in a tiny-toothed frame.

—Alexis van Dijk 

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