On the podcast, I told Krystal Henry that my mother keeps every card she receives.

Birthday cards. Mother's Day cards. Anniversary cards from decades ago. She has them. Stored. Saved. Kept in a floral chest apart but close to the chest that houses the family photo albums.

Krystal runs Around the Way Parchment, a greeting card business. She's telling me how some people underestimate greeting cards in the digital age. How they think it's just paper but she’s proving them wrong.

Not the official record—the real one.

Greeting cards mark who you were on that day. They prove what mattered enough to say and sign off on. They capture relationships in real time, not just who someone was to you legally, but who they were to you actually.

In Black families, kinship doesn't always follow the organizational chart. A friend can be as close as a sister if not closer. Your mother's friend who looked out for you is in your archive too. The father who was celebrated on Father’s Day even though he’s not a biological father—that card is a legacy keepsake.

Krystal started Around the Way Parchment because she couldn't find a Mother's Day card for her friend. The greeting card industry said: that relationship doesn't count. Krystal said: watch me print it and see what happens. The market has responded in her favor.

And now those cards, the ones that acknowledge how we actually build family, the ones that say what we really say to each other are going into someone's shoebox or storage bin. They're becoming part of the archive that proves: this is how we were loved through time. This is who mattered. This is what family actually looked like. These archives speak to the village we have whether we’ve realized or not.

Official archives care about documents that prove you existed in systems. Birth certificates. Marriage licenses. Deeds. Family archives hold what systems don't track: the birthday card from your play-cousin. The encouragement note from your girl when you needed it most. The Mother's Day card that says "Your light leaves a legacy and your love tells a story," Yea, Hallmark could never.

But archives require preservation. And preservation requires infrastructure. The institutions that preserve official history aren't coming for our shoeboxes. If we want our family records to survive—the photos, the letters, the greeting cards that prove how we actually loved each other—we have to build it ourselves.

Watch the full conversation with Krystal. [Link]

What she's building with Around the Way Parchment matters beyond the business. She's making sure the greeting cards in our archives actually sound like us.

In Baltimore, artist Derrick Adams founded Charm City Cultural Cultivation, which runs workshops teaching people how to digitize their own family archives. How to preserve the photos, the letters, and cards.

Krystal prints the cards. Derrick teaches preservation. My mother keeps them all.

Greeting cards are for everyone.

Family archives aren't just sentimental.

They're evidence.