The drawer of old cards contains people at ages they no longer are.

Correspondence accumulates into an accidental archive of everyone’s earlier selves. The handwriting in there belongs to people at thirty who are now sixty, to relatives who have since become ill or died, to friends whose lives took turns none of them had heard of yet. Reading through it is a strange kind of time travel, because you meet them mid-sentence in a year they thought was ordinary. None of it was written to be kept.

If you have a drawer like this, go through it slowly and with somebody if you can. Say the names out loud. That is most of what it is for.