Was it a sly expression of love that landed in a Brighton mailbox one recent day? An innocent gesture from a dear friend? A keepsake from a favorite uncle off on an exotic adventure?
Michael Cioffi will never know.
"It just showed up in the mail," he said.
The postcard, penned 78 years ago by a traveler with the initials M.C., simply says, "Greetings." Bearing a green one-cent stamp and a picture of Yellowstone National Park's Tower Falls, it is addressed to "Miss Margeret McDonald." Not surprisingly, Miss McDonald wasn't around when it arrived.
Cioffi bought the six-bedroom Victorian house on Sparhawk Street in 1998 and over the years he's found other remnants of the McDonalds, such as glass bottles and cards with the name of the family business, in cobwebbed corners. The bottling company John McDonald & Co. was located a few blocks away at the corner of North Beacon and Market streets, an intersection now home to a gas station and a Dunkin' Donuts.
Though the McDonalds occupied the Brighton house for most of the 20th century, Cioffi doesn't think there's anyone to pass the postcard on to.
"The last one passed away, and the estate sold the house," he said.
Occasionally he gets junk mail for one of the McDonalds, but the postcard was a surprise.
"At first, I thought maybe it was found in the bottom of a drawer," he said. "But it was in with the mail that had just been delivered."
Though not common, such tardy deliveries do happen, said Bob Cannon, a spokesman for the US Postal Service in Boston. He said it is impossible to prove how the card went on its improbable journey, but hypothesized that it was first delivered to the Brighton address in 1929, was kept for decades, and then was accidentally resent early this year.
He said it was highly unlikely that the postcard was lost in the mail for nearly 80 years, because there are few, if any, 80-year-old mail processing facilities. "We have hardly any buildings from that time," he said.
This much is known: The postcard has two postmarks: one from 9 a.m. on June 30, 1929, from Yellowstone Park, and a second from Seattle dated earlier this year.
"Someone probably had it in a drawer, a closet, who knows where, and somehow it got into the mail stream again," Cannon said.
Mail processing machines somehow sent the postcard on, despite the fact that it was 25 cents short on postage. And with thousands of pieces of mail to sort each day, the local carrier probably didn't notice the stamp or the postmark, Cannon said.
"By the rules, it should have gone postage due," he said.
The post office doesn't track the number of letters delivered decades after they're sent, but Cannon said he hears of perhaps a dozen a year across the country.
In 1999, a North Andover man received a letter he had mailed to himself 64 years earlier in order to get a keepsake postmark. Last month, a postcard from Maine arrived at the town hall in Stratford, Conn., for a man who had been dead 40 years.
"The stars have to be aligned completely correctly for it to happen," Cannon said.
Tania deLuzuriaga can be reached at deluzuriaga@globe.com.
