The Postcard That Changed Everything

When I was in my early twenties, I worked at a small bookstore in a quiet coastal town in Oregon. It wasn’t the kind of place you stayed forever, but it was comforting in its predictability. I shelved books, helped customers find their next read, and spent slow afternoons flipping through novels I’d never bought but wanted to understand. It was a peaceful, albeit challenging, existence.

Before this, I had been chasing something undefined. I had dabbled in a creative writing degree at a state college, dropped out, and tried to make a go of freelance writing. But none of it felt solid, and I constantly second-guessed myself. The bookstore gave me a sense of stability when I didn’t know what else to do.

That’s where I met Martha.

Martha wasn’t like the other staff at the store. She wasn’t a retiree looking for a pastime or a student earning pocket money. She was older than me by at least twenty years, tall, with streaks of silver in her thick, dark hair, and an easy laugh that filled the quiet aisles. She wore flowing skirts and oversized sweaters, always smelling faintly of lavender. Her presence was magnetic, and her words seemed to hold more weight than they should.

Martha had lived in Paris in her twenties, worked as a translator in Japan, and once crossed the U.S. on a motorcycle. I don’t think any of us at the bookstore truly understood why she was there, shelving paperbacks with the rest of us. But Martha had a way of seeing people—really seeing them—that made you feel as if you were exactly where you needed to be.

One rainy Tuesday, while we were unpacking a shipment of books, Martha asked me why I wasn’t writing. I blinked at her, confused. How did she know? She shrugged. “You have that look—like you’re carrying a story in your back pocket and waiting for the right moment to take it out.”

I laughed nervously, brushing her off. But her words stuck. Over the months, she became my unofficial mentor. We’d sit in the break room during slow hours, sipping coffee from mismatched mugs as she told me about her adventures and nudged me toward my own.

“Fear is like bad weather,” she’d say. “You can’t stop it, but you can prepare for it. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you find beauty in it.”

Martha left the bookstore about a year later. No one knew where she went, but a postcard from Alaska arrived a month after she left, addressed to me. It was simple: a picture of Denali National Park on the front, and the back, a single line in her neat, looping script: *“Tell your story. Someone needs to hear it.”*

I carried that postcard in my wallet for years. It was my talisman, my gentle nudge forward. I went back to school, finished my degree, and started writing in earnest. First small essays, then short stories, then my first novel. Martha’s words always lingered in my mind, reminding me that fear was part of the process.

Years later, I found myself standing in a gallery in Seattle, staring at a painting that felt like a portal to a memory. A woman with streaks of silver in her hair, walking across a beach, her face turned to the sea. The plaque read, "Martha: A Life Lived Wildly” by Jacob Russell.*

I asked the curator about it. “Oh, Martha,” he said with a wistful smile. “She was a local legend. Taught me to paint. She passed a few years ago, but not before she told me to tell my story.”

That night, I went home and pulled out her postcard, its edges worn and the ink faded. I sat at my desk and began to write—not for publication, not for accolades, but for the simple act of sharing, of putting my story into the world as she had asked.

Martha was right. Fear is like bad weather. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you find beauty in it.