Blast from the Past

When I was packing up for the move to Dallas this past June, I rediscovered a couple of small boxes that my brother gave to me last year. They contain many of the letters that I wrote to my mother over the years. I read a few, then put the boxes away to resume packing, determined that I would go through them at a later date and put them back in chronological order.

With the husband working overtime almost the whole entire weekend, and having absolutely nothing to do, I spontaneously started going through the letters last night. At first, I wasn’t sure that it was the best idea. Earlier this week, my kitty broke the magnet that I had bought while shopping with my mother when she visited us on Maui. That visit was the last time that I saw her while she was healthy; she died less than a year later (still so hard to believe).

Here's the sad little magnet that kitty broke.

At any rate, I was pretty upset about the broken magnet, much more upset than I had expected to be, so I thought that maybe reading these letters would upset me as well. However, it turned out to be pretty fun.

The very earliest letter is from Feb. 1994, during my freshman year of college. The last is from Jan. 2007, my last full year of living in Portland (although I didn’t know it at the time). But the bulk of the letters are from Aug. 1996 – Oct. 2000: my last year of college, the year I spent in Minnesota, and my first couple of years in Portland. I know that there were many more letters than these. They’re probably still somewhere in Mom’s house; I doubt she threw them away.

I thought that reading them would be kind of embarrassing, but for the most part it’s just fascinating. The most striking thing is how much I’ve forgotten. There are people I mention that I can no longer recall, as in I literally cannot picture them, but there they are on the page, with me talking about them like they were important to my life. There are also lots of events I mention attending that are lost to the mists of my memory. For example, I mention, more than once, going to see my roommate-at-the-time’s friend’s band “Lolly” play. Now I can’t remember this band at all. I don’t even know what kind of music they played. I looked them up on iTunes but they’re not there.

In all honesty, most of what I write about is rather boring, or it would be to an outsider. For me, though, it’s interesting to see my progression through the years, especially my young adult years, to see how I slowly became the person I am today.

I’ve been considering scanning the letters into the computer and/or typing them up, but I’m not sure yet if that’s a step too far. For now, I think it’s enough to read through them and put them in order. I’m thrilled to have this time capsule of my life, and grateful to my mother for (perhaps unknowingly) saving it for me. It’s a pretty cool thing that anyone would be lucky to have.