A man in Long Beach, California, discovered a postcard from the past in his mailbox last week. His parents sent it him over 25 years ago.
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Where Was the Postcard From?
As reported by ABC7, Bob Sheppard couldn't believe his eyes when he opened his mailbox on Wednesday, Aug. 5. Inside was a postcard mailed to him from Copenhagen, Norway. It was signed "M&D," meaning "Mom and Dad."
"I just started looking at it and go, 'Oh my gosh. This is a treasure!'" he said. "It was the only mail I got that day."
On the back of the card was a handwritten message about his parents' trip to Denmark.
"Hi-
Arrived safely about 5:30P. It's now 8:30P & still very light out... Nice weather now - warm & humid. Flying in, we saw lots of water and green, green land everywhere," it read.
But perhaps what is most haunting about the postcard is that by the time it made its way to Sheppard, both of his parents had died.
Why Did the Card Take So Long To Reach Sheppard?
Sheppard's mother had died four years ago. His father died during the COVID-19 pandemic two years earlier. Because of the safety restrictions at that time, he couldn't say goodbye to his Army veteran father.
According to Sheppard, his parents were world travelers. He described his mother as a "social butterfly." Sheppard said his father was "an intelligent man, very, very caring, very loving."
Over the years, the California man kept a log of all the locales his parents visited, including their stop in Denmark in July 2000. However, the postmark on the card Sheppard received is dated August 2026.
"[My mail carrier] believes that probably what happened to this postcard is that it somehow fell out of a bin or a basket or a shelf or something like that, and it maybe went underneath a desk or a file cabinet or something like that, and they must've just found it recently and said, 'Hey, the guy still lives at the same address. Let's go ahead and send it to him,'" he explained.
But Sheppard sees the postcard's arrival as a miracle, saying, "This was, to me, almost a postcard from heaven."
