What started me back on my blogging journey was finally, I say finally, because I'm concluding a project that I've wanted to put together for a decade but didn't have the time to set aside or the materials at hand that worked for me. Who knows? Anyway, I picked up a lovely scrapbook one day this week. It was there waiting for me on the shelf at Joanne's. How do I know this to be true? I am not a scrapbook girl. Not for me the various papers and cutesy things to adhere to each page. No, I'm a digital scrapbook girl. Shutterfly was designed for me. I can change layouts, embellishments, frames, textbox's with a click of my wrist. If it doesn't work it can be changed. When you are working with glue, scissors, etcetera it's much more permanent and then... you're stuck with what you may have thought was a great plan is anything but. And then what do you do?
Rewind to Joanne's: This lovely white scrapbook with baby blue stripes and the letter B in blue in the center of the scrapbook album caught my eye. The project I'm working on is a collection of letters from my aunt Bette to me from 1970 until 1984. They begin when I was in high school. My aunt's recovery from a radical mastecemy continuing on with my being a newlywed (at 20) moving into my first apartment, the births of David (1980) and Tara (1983). We talk about vacations, recipes, family and friends. Movies, music, concerts, books, everyday life. It concludes 4 weeks before my aunt's death in 1984. The cancer had returned as a tumor in her arm then traveled to her lungs. It's a fantastic scrapbook. My aunt was elegant, cultured, well-traveled and funny! love how this scrapbook is coming together. Is there anything more personal than hand-written pages and the expressing of thoughts onto paper? By next weekend I should be finished.
Another album I've put together in the short term is a collection of my Christmas letters. These begin upon our move to Sonora in 1989 and go until 2007. My family is so scattered that life before Facebook was letter writing which morphed into computerized holiday greetings. These will be in book form and published for Dave and Amanda. It begins with Dave being 9, Tara 6, Amanda 3 until Dave was married and had children. Amanda had Landie, I had divorced their dad and had remarried and we were buying a house in San Andreas. Which brings me to this blog, who'd have thunk there was a connection. The connection is as I came across the intro to my 2007 newsletter it could almost, seriously, almost have been written by me this past Christmas. The more things change the more they remain the same. SO, I thought I would share here what my Christmas introduction said then. Poor Dave and Amanda this is the curse of having a mother that is a writer... everything is documented. I have almost everyday of their life recorded in a journal somewhere. Fasten your seat belts, here we go!
Reach for the fullness of human life- if you but touch it, it will fascinate. We live it all, but few live it knowingly. -- Goethe
Dearest family and friends:
My medium, alas, continues to be things. An avalanche of things. Some thing accrue into collections or nascent collections; reminders of deliciously decadent weekends, luxuriantly spent scavenging through historic Mother Lode street-front shops, thrift stores and flea markets, instant collections. I need books, either new or previously owned books. Stuff adds up. I've seemed to have moved in repeated circles between Santa Clara, Los Gatos, Santa Clara, Tracy, Sonora, Copper, Murphys, Copper, Angels Camp, San Andreas (and now back to Sonora). Great heaving tectonic moves. Each time I've dragged along everything I've owned, and each time, I've left with more than when I arrived, even though I've always seemed to have given half of it away. Home's a place where to put everything from the Cities and small-sized rural towns I've lived in. A place where on rainy afternoons, I would sift through it all and try to make sense of the journey. For 30-plus years my residences have charmed guests with artful trophies from past lives, many of them mine. Gold rimmed china, art, books, photographs, more books, music collections including 78's, 45's and 33 LPM vinyl recordings, cassettes, CD's, et al. A few more books, a box of treasured postal cards (now in an album), more books, vintage, hand-painted silk garters that belonged to my grandmother. Movies; Blue Ray and non Blue Ray DVD's, VHS movies, more books, beautifully crafted hand-made gifts from my children (and now grandchildren). More books, my grandfather's 1904 steamer trunk. I'd turned into a custodian of the past and an archivist of goods. This compost was rich material for someone who might be say, fascinated by me, O yeah, that person would be me!
The objects you buy at 17 tell you who you are going to be, the objects you own at 50 remind you of who you once were.
Moving, I've discovered is like... peeling an onion. One layer leads to the next layer, but each layer has it's own meaning. As I let go of the shells of my past, I closed the door on an essential truth, somewhere after the 20th box went out the door, none of it seemed to important any more. As I jettisoned the baggage of decades past, I discovered new joy and freedom. As Mies vander Rohe said, less is more. It's also about different. Once you get there, everything shifts in your life, often in marvelous ways. Our new home reflects the distance I've traveled in my life and yet reverberates with a zest for music, art, movies, food and books.
Then moving into my intro to January I quoted Nickelback:
I miss that town
I miss their faces
You can't erase
You can't replace it
I miss it now
I can't believe it
So hard to stay
Too hard to leave it
If I could relive those days
I know the one thing that would never change
Look at this photograph
Every time I do it makes me laugh
Every time I do it makes me....
