Vacation update, or, Amazing things found in what used to be my closet
So we've now been in Calgary for about four and a half days. (Our suitcase has been here for three days.) Bizarrely, I haven't cooked anything yet except one batch of blueberry muffins. (Tomorrow it will be saskatoon muffins, because at the Cochrane farmer's market yesterday I bought two bags of frozen saskatoons from the Hutterite produce stand. YUM.) We've been eating out quite a bit: my mom has belatedly discovered, in the last couple of years, the concept of not spending the entire day cooking for her company ;^). I have been playing the piano a lot, though. I suck (18 years of not practising will produce that effect), but it's fun, and my audience is pretty uncritical.
What I have also been doing, inter alia, is reaming out the closet in my old bedroom (now one of several guest rooms and random book depositories) so that my mom's new boarder/housesitter, who will move in at the beginning of September, will have somewhere to keep her clothes. And man, is there some bizarro stuff in there. Thus far I have found, inter alia,
- a couple of dozen binders containing class notes and lab reports from high school (I am recycling the notes but keeping the lab reports, which represent a LOT of time and effort, especially the Drosophila melanogaster genetics project from grade 11)
- a shoebox full of random plastic bags from assorted shops (wtf??)
- the Akubra hat I bought in Australia in 1989
- a wooden hoop from the annual Wellesley College hoop-rolling thingy, which belongs to my mom, even though she never actually participated in said hoop-rolling thingy, and two freshman beanies (1962 and 1963), which ditto
- a box full of ca. 1950s kid gloves (and beaded fabric gloves) of indeterminate provenance
- a bag of marbles that also contained three roller balls from roll-on deodorants
- half a dozen truly fugly belts
- half a dozen fugly handbags
- some George V and George VI pennies and halfpennies (am giving these to SP for her coin collection)
- two Canada Fitness Test badges, one silver and one gold (!)
- my uniform jacket from the 1992 Mount Royal Youth Choir Scotland tour (also uniform sweater from MRYC Australia tour in 1989)
- one pink knee-high
- a grey fun-fur muff on a string (like, white kitchen string)
The most amazing thing, though, is the boxes of correspondence. In my youth, I was a voluminous correspondent, and though I'm not sure anyone wrote me quite as many letters as I tended to write them, I did end up with quite a big collection (ca. 5 shoeboxes full) of letters from other people. And, wow.
I found, for example, the cheering-up-Sylvia note that my friend RE wrote me when I was depressed about breaking up with my Grade 11 boyfriend, hitherto the Love Of My Life (in true teenage-angst style). I found a deeply emotional-philosophical-political letter from JD, written during our first year of university (I was at York, he was at U of A), which reminds me exactly why we've been friends all these years even during those periods when we don't actually keep in touch much. I found several HILARIOUS letters of approx. same vintage from my friend GWB (still in high school) and from my little brother, who was in grade 9 when I went away to uni and who typed these amazing semi-stream-of-consciousness epistles about aquarium fish, skateboarding, school, etc., on my mom's PC. I've found stacks of letters from JR, TO, and AJ, which I haven't looked into yet because I find I have to keep my indulgence in nostalgia to short bursts. And I found a particular letter from a particular person that freaked me out so much the first time I read it that I don't think I can bring myself to read it again. (Also, I found about six dozen unused postcards bought during various trips over the years, which I stacked tidily, put in a ziploc bag, and put in the Goodwill basket. Somebody will find a good use for them.)
You know, I love e-mail. I love LJ and Facebook and MBs and the Intarwebz generally. But I must say ... I do miss letters. I miss writing them -- which I really don't have time to do these days, because writing takes way longer than typing and it's harder to fix your mistakes -- and I really miss getting them in the mail: opening the mailbox and seeing a hand-addressed envelope or two in amongst the bills, taking the mail upstairs and sitting down with a cup of tea to read the words someone I love wrote (or maybe typed, I guess) with his or her own hands a week ago, hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. Sometimes the handwriting (esp. the Brotherling's) is hard to decipher, but it's always instantly recognizable -- I found last night I could identify the letter-writer from the address on the envelope even when no name was included in the return address -- and intensely personal. Those shoeboxes are so full of so many memories -- happy and sad and squirm-inducing ones, vivid and fuzzy ones, home and away ones, funny and painful and warm fuzzy ones.
I don't know what I'm going to do with all this correspondence, but there's no way I'm throwing it out.
. . .
WiP update, while I'm at it:
Total words: 9183
Words in current chapter: 1999
Total chapters: 2+prologue, one in progress
Haven't deleted anything for a couple of days, which means either I'm writing good stuff or I'm not judging it very leniently ;^)
What I have also been doing, inter alia, is reaming out the closet in my old bedroom (now one of several guest rooms and random book depositories) so that my mom's new boarder/housesitter, who will move in at the beginning of September, will have somewhere to keep her clothes. And man, is there some bizarro stuff in there. Thus far I have found, inter alia,
- a couple of dozen binders containing class notes and lab reports from high school (I am recycling the notes but keeping the lab reports, which represent a LOT of time and effort, especially the Drosophila melanogaster genetics project from grade 11)
- a shoebox full of random plastic bags from assorted shops (wtf??)
- the Akubra hat I bought in Australia in 1989
- a wooden hoop from the annual Wellesley College hoop-rolling thingy, which belongs to my mom, even though she never actually participated in said hoop-rolling thingy, and two freshman beanies (1962 and 1963), which ditto
- a box full of ca. 1950s kid gloves (and beaded fabric gloves) of indeterminate provenance
- a bag of marbles that also contained three roller balls from roll-on deodorants
- half a dozen truly fugly belts
- half a dozen fugly handbags
- some George V and George VI pennies and halfpennies (am giving these to SP for her coin collection)
- two Canada Fitness Test badges, one silver and one gold (!)
- my uniform jacket from the 1992 Mount Royal Youth Choir Scotland tour (also uniform sweater from MRYC Australia tour in 1989)
- one pink knee-high
- a grey fun-fur muff on a string (like, white kitchen string)
The most amazing thing, though, is the boxes of correspondence. In my youth, I was a voluminous correspondent, and though I'm not sure anyone wrote me quite as many letters as I tended to write them, I did end up with quite a big collection (ca. 5 shoeboxes full) of letters from other people. And, wow.
I found, for example, the cheering-up-Sylvia note that my friend RE wrote me when I was depressed about breaking up with my Grade 11 boyfriend, hitherto the Love Of My Life (in true teenage-angst style). I found a deeply emotional-philosophical-political letter from JD, written during our first year of university (I was at York, he was at U of A), which reminds me exactly why we've been friends all these years even during those periods when we don't actually keep in touch much. I found several HILARIOUS letters of approx. same vintage from my friend GWB (still in high school) and from my little brother, who was in grade 9 when I went away to uni and who typed these amazing semi-stream-of-consciousness epistles about aquarium fish, skateboarding, school, etc., on my mom's PC. I've found stacks of letters from JR, TO, and AJ, which I haven't looked into yet because I find I have to keep my indulgence in nostalgia to short bursts. And I found a particular letter from a particular person that freaked me out so much the first time I read it that I don't think I can bring myself to read it again. (Also, I found about six dozen unused postcards bought during various trips over the years, which I stacked tidily, put in a ziploc bag, and put in the Goodwill basket. Somebody will find a good use for them.)
You know, I love e-mail. I love LJ and Facebook and MBs and the Intarwebz generally. But I must say ... I do miss letters. I miss writing them -- which I really don't have time to do these days, because writing takes way longer than typing and it's harder to fix your mistakes -- and I really miss getting them in the mail: opening the mailbox and seeing a hand-addressed envelope or two in amongst the bills, taking the mail upstairs and sitting down with a cup of tea to read the words someone I love wrote (or maybe typed, I guess) with his or her own hands a week ago, hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. Sometimes the handwriting (esp. the Brotherling's) is hard to decipher, but it's always instantly recognizable -- I found last night I could identify the letter-writer from the address on the envelope even when no name was included in the return address -- and intensely personal. Those shoeboxes are so full of so many memories -- happy and sad and squirm-inducing ones, vivid and fuzzy ones, home and away ones, funny and painful and warm fuzzy ones.
I don't know what I'm going to do with all this correspondence, but there's no way I'm throwing it out.
. . .
WiP update, while I'm at it:
Total words: 9183
Words in current chapter: 1999
Total chapters: 2+prologue, one in progress
Haven't deleted anything for a couple of days, which means either I'm writing good stuff or I'm not judging it very leniently ;^)