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Downsizing, boxes of photos, letters

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Blog

Published: 21 May 2025

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So, downsizing, trying to get through the mountains of stuff the boy dragged into the house. 

Stuff to the Antique shop. This week, candlesticks, an antique typewriter. There will be more, lots more.

Then there were the letters. First of all the paper material the kids acquired in their school years, achievements, diaries. These are not mine, I cannot get rid of them, so I open an old suitcase and find it filled with hundreds of letters. Quite literally hundreds. Postcards, old photos, people I'd long forgot, people I can't - despite me, remember.

I thought I had destroyed all these letters, a long time a go when I dated a certain Lorna who would stay at home reading letters from an ex and getting crazy and making me crazy as well. But I only destroyed the letters from her and life went on and more friendships were made and hundreds of other letters were sent and received.

Somewhere or another I lost touch with all of them, I look at all the addresses I had, London, several, Prague, - one, and a landlady that stole the mail so she could censure it, she was nosy, trying to sabotage any friendships I might have kept up...

Then Calgary, and the half dozen or so addresses there.

I look at the letters briefly, ex girlfriends, from Anna who has immaculate cursive writing, that of the student getting her fingers rapped by nuns, there was Kirk - squatmate, Sean-Planter, Sneh-co-worker in Calgary, Maeve - Planter, Iskra - Flatmate in London, Mary, Co-worker London, Brian, Co-worker London, Jennifer, a dozen others....

I looks some of them up. Dinah, an old co-worker who maintained a fine flirtation when I travelled abroad, find her online and MY GOD I RECOGNIZE HER! She looks - virtually the same. Age, yes, but not unkind. Kirk, I find him, a voiceover actor, campaigner for men's mental health. Iskra, blacked out now on Facebook, some movie credits, Sean, a Therapist based out of Kelowna, Debbie, (had forgotten) - now a molecular biologist/scientist in Israel, quite high up, Dana - and who, exactly, is Dana, and I read the letter, can't place how I knew her, where we met...

Others I can find nothing on. Vanished, in the days of the internet and Facebook and somehow they found a way to slip through a crack and vanish from the earth...

It makes me happy to see that these people from your past have done well. Of course, you don't know, but I suspect most of them have. They look well in their fields and their photos.

The people you know, have letters from, have never seen again, somewhere in the mid 90’s letters stopped, a move too far, change of address with no forwarding address or perhaps the relationships had run their course

Postcards from Kirk in Jakarta, erotic letters from ex's, (before sexting was a thing you had to commit it to paper), an invitation to an ex's wedding which I missed because I was living abroad...photographs, negatives, postcards, Valentines, etc, etc, all these to be gone through and sorted, destroyed, one wants to somewhat curate one's past, life.

The days, these days of late, cloaked in rain and mist. 

This will be a gold mind, there's inspiration aplenty, to rework and shape and reorder the meaning and - while it's trauma going back through it it is also - well, I like mixed media, the stamps, air-mail envelopes, cards, there are infinite possibilities and I have a few ideas....