It has been way too long since I last blogged and my only somewhat valid excuse is that I moved out of my home in January, gutted it to the studs and am now getting resettled in my "brand new" old house. This is something I feared and postponed way too long but turned out to be one of the best things I ever did. I suppose I could have written about the process of moving out of a house filled with twenty years of accumulation but I was otherwise engaged filling dumpsters and packing boxes. Now that I am resettled, I continue the purge, especially the paper, talismans and texts that sometime ago I felt were worth keeping. Every empty box is a baby step to getting back to normal. As I unpack the books, files and ephemera that survived the first round, I ask myself the hard question about all this "stuff." Does this serve my life? Will I miss this DVD I never watched or an old address book from two decades ago? The answer is a loud NO.
The flip side of my resolve to lighten the load of my life is my re-discovery of old letters in dusty, taped cardboard boxes. The loss of letters saddens me. There is an intimacy in a handwritten letter that cannot be found in an email. Letters are like slow food, slow talk. Communicating with that time lag of delivery allows for a longing that is dissipated in a text or a tweet.  Long gone friends and family linger in their written words.  My friendship with Jeanette Adams lives in countless letters with her open round script and snarky humor. I found a small notecard where she wrote that she was diagnosed with breast cancer and wouldn't be visiting me in California.  She said she couldn't call me because she knew she would start crying. I found another letter from a friend which read like an essay about living near the ocean with the impending peril of a hurricane. Today a passage of that length and depth would probably be an email attachment that I would never take the time to read. I also read some wonderful letters from Amber, a neighbor's child who added "The Great" to her name at the end of all of her correspondence. A few days ago amidst my slow trip down memory lane, I received a postcard from a college friend who was traveling in Iceland.  It was a rare treat to get a note and picture of someone's travel that was just for me rather than a facebook status report, "Hey, I'm in Iceland."
After a few hours of reading my old letters, warmed by the memories, I don't even ponder the question, "Will this serve my life?" I smooth the folded papers, put them back in their envelopes and give them a  new home in a new box for a future afternoon journey back in time.