BOSTON -- Neither snow nor rain nor the decades of time prevented the post office from completing the delivery of a June 1929 postcard to a Brighton, Mass., home.

Nearly 79 years after it was sent, a postcard of Yellowstone National Park's Tower Falls arrived in the Brighton mailbox with the one-word message, "greetings." The intended recipient, a Miss Margaret McDonald, had long since left the Victorian home and the sender was identified only by the initials M.C.

The current owner of the home, Michael Cioffi, said the McDonald family did own the home for many generations, but he doesn't know of any relatives to pass the postcard to.

Postal Service spokesman Robert Cannon said it's impossible to know what happened with the card.

"Someone probably had it in a drawer, a closet, who knows where, and somehow it got into the mail stream again," Cannon said.

What Cannon does know is that it was sent with a one cent stamp from Seattle earlier this year. The mail processors sent the card through, even though it was 25 cents short on postage.

"By the rules, it should have gone postage due," he said.

Cannon said it's unlikely that the postcard was lost in the mail for nearly 80 years, since the post office has few, if any, mail processing facilities that old.