Yesterday I was visiting my parents and my mother gave me a box filled with stuff that she had kept for me over the years. Letters, college transcripts, medical stuff. Some of them were the cards I had made for my parents when I was little, so full of I love you notes to them. So sweet!
Best of all were the dozens of letters I have written them over the years, mostly from my traveling days. This was Way Back When, before emails were even an idea, before computers even existed. Back then, you wrote letters on skinny, see through paper and sent things air mail.
I traveled a lot. I wrote them letters from my semester abroad from Aix-en Provence. From Okinawa where I spent a month with my Karate Sensei in College. From Japan when I lived there for a few years. From Germany when I moved there when my son was still only a baby. There were missives from London, where I had high tea in a swanky hotel and went Christmas shopping at Harrods.
I wrote them from Geneva, and Lucerne and enclosed pictures of mountains and me running through a field doing a Julie Andrews imitation.
I sent postcards from Venice, Florence and Athens. From an island in Greece, I wrote them and told them that I was dropping out of college and would be staying on that island. I most have received a stern NO WAY in reply since I came back eventually and finished college.
I got a daring new hair cut in Paris and was very pleased with it, which made up for the bedbugs in the youth hostel and a series of missed trains, planes and busses.
I bought jade in the markets of Kowloon and Hong Kong. Once with a group of Karate friends and once again many years later on my honeymoon.
I sent a long and delirious letter when I was sick as a dog and sure I was dying in Cairo.
I visited Bangkok and Pusan in South Korea. I drove all over Japan on the back of a motorcycle with my mittens clipped together to keep me from falling off when I fell asleep on the back.
I walked around European markets, museums and festivals with my small son in a stroller and his baby brother in a special baby backpack.
In reading them, I was astonished about what an intrepid traveler I have always been. And I remembered lots of small, amusing and meaningful events I recorded in these letters. They might have been forgotten completely if I didn’t have these reminders. Clearly, I have been a writer my whole life too, and I found them so touching and amusing to read. I feel a little sad that we have lost the art of letter writing and wonder if email and social media can ever make up the difference.
In a strange way, it felt like reading someone else’s letters, except I know it was me, I remember it all. But I have changed so much and hopefully gained wisdom and perspective with the years too. All those beautiful moments strung together, like lanterns on a string that have made up my life and created the person that I am today.
I felt a tender and protective love for the me of back then. She sure loved a lot, got her heart broken about a hundred times and yet somehow never gave up on her love of travel and adventure. And she never gave up on herself or on love either.
I spent some time sending love back to her for those hard moments, painful lessons and heartbreaks. I still have a lot more of them to go through, so I am going to make a cup of tea, sit in the sun and enjoy the journey. Wish me a bon journey!
