Tonight I am recycling my past. Literally. I've just taken five bags of paper out to the curb, years of birthday cards and holiday cards, letters to me at college and at [dance] camp, graduation cards from college, high school, and yes, jr. high school.
The motives for this purge were twofold: rid myself of many boxes of stuff that I would most likely never look at again and didn't want to move, and to try to find my original birth certificate and SS card that are somewhere in the same envelope, someplace.
Well, I did not achieve the latter. Of the former I have reduced the seven or so boxes down to one medium size box and one very small box. I call that a success.
But what I really gained from sorting through everything was not a rehash of the past - I didn't read it all - but rather an appreciation of how in touch people were with me. In college, Deb wrote lots of letters to me, and Mom sent me cards quite often. I got letters from college friends over the summer and winter holidays. During my years at camp there were long letters from Jennifer, postcards from Eleanor and Emily and lots of other people. And throughout the last 15 or so years, there have been postcards from Susie, letters from Susie, clippings, drawings, tufts of down, pictures of cats, and stickers of turkish pop stars.
Just thinking of all of the paper, of all of the time people took to send a note or a card, makes me feel really loved. That memory had gotten lost, or fuzzy and faded among all of the others.
Though I love email and the speed and ease of all of these electrons, I hope there's still a place for paper in life, so that in 15 years from now I'll have another half dozen boxes of memories and chronicles and connections to people to remind me that there were many moments when someone was thinking of me.
Send me a letter sometime, would you?
1 comment:
When you have a new address, I would be honored to help inaugurate your mailbox. :)
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