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Love, Dad

Father sends daily postcards to daughter

Bryn Cavin and her dad, Darby
Bryn Cavin and her dad, Darby, are shown during a recent family outing. Darby mails postcards to his daughter almost daily while she is away at college.

Like many college students, Bryn Cavin looks forward to receiving mail from home.

There’s something special about her deliveries, though: She gets a postcard from her dad just about every day.

“Getting a postcard from him is always one of my favorite parts of the day,” said Bryn, a sophomore at Whitworth University in Spokane, WA.

Bryn’s father, Darby Cavin, often mails the postcards at his hometown Post Office in Cosmopolis, WA, which is about six hours away from the campus.

The notes usually offer encouragement or an update on what’s happening at home with him and the rest of the family, including Bryn’s mom, Sara, and younger sister, Kendall.

“One of the realizations I’ve had in writing these postcards is just how mundane most of my days are,” said Darby. “But I like sharing them with Bryn.”

The postcards bridge a gap.

“He writes about the simple, everyday parts of my family’s life that I miss out on by being on the other side of the state,” said Bryn.

Dad also looks for postcards for his daughter wherever he and the family go, preferring literature and art-themed ones for Bryn, an English major.

“They just saw ‘Hamilton,’ so he bought a package of ‘Hamilton’-themed postcards for me at the theatre,” she said.

A Spokane TV station recently aired a story about Bryn’s daily postcards. Coincidentally, a Georgia man who has sent an estimated 20,000 postcards to his children since 1995 was the subject of a recent piece on the “CBS Evening News.”

Darby hasn’t sent that many postcards to Bryn, but give him time.

When Kendall, a high school junior, leaves home, he plans to continue the postcard tradition.

“In this age of electronic communication, I like the idea of the handwritten note,” he said. “It makes me think of the Latin proverb Verba volant, scripta manent, which means spoken words fly away, written words remain.”

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