Penny Postcards and Prairie Flowers
At the Lewis and Clark Library in Helena, poet and writer Philip Burgess describes through poems and stories the journey his grandmother Anna Lee and great-aunt Dicka Lee made from their family’s homestead in northern Minnesota out to eastern Montana where they became homesteaders themselves.
Burgess reads excerpts from nearly three hundred postcards that female relatives and friends back in Minnesota sent to Anna and Dicka Lee as they moved out into the world. These postcards functioned like modern-day e-mail, providing a way to share their litany of experiences be they disasters, humor, illnesses, adventure, hard work, or just social chatter.