Friday, June 25, 2010

Addressing Change



Projects to keep-busy-while-the-Bernina-gets-a-rebuilt-motherboard-and-I-don't-want-to-think-about-whether-or-not-it-can-be-saved  continue apace. It's been better for me than I would ever have believed possible. All kinds of odds and ends are getting tied up, cut, tossed out and filed.  It's a good thing, and a little therapeutic.

One chore I'm still circling around is my address book changeover.  I've had the same one for over 20 years and it is pretty much impossible to navigate.  In that time span there have been so many changes, moves, cross-outs and (sadly) deaths that all  of the ensuing marking out and taping over  have rendered it pretty much illegible.  So why has it taken me so long to make the move to a new one?

Three years ago my husband and I were in Italy enjoying a belated return trip we promised each other would happen on our 5th anniversary.  (It was our 20th.) While I did not believe it possible, Italy was more spectacular the second time around.  I'd go back in a minute - hell  I'd move there in a minute.

My souvenir purchases have always been a little left of center - in Japan I bought fabric.  In Spain I bought Pepto Bismol. (Thank heavens for  an English pharmacy in  Gibraltar.)  On my honeymoon in Italy I bought beautiful gold earrings.  This time I bought an address book.  A Fabriano address book.  (I don't mess around.)  It has been sitting on my desk lo these three years and I have been unable to make the move.  At first  it was that intoxicating new-leather smell. The thick, buttery paper was too gorgeous to mess it up with ink.  It was just so clean,  so pure and so elegant.

When I made my first attempt to make the big changeover I ran smack into a brick wall.  As I started turning the pages of the old book I remembered relatives, places and events (dates of surgeries next to the physician contact information)  and all kinds of people who were no longer in my life.  The hardest page was the "M" page.  That is traditionally reserved for my immediate family.  The addresses have all changed, and some of those changes were not caused by "just" moving.  It is a snapshot of my immediate family before things took a hard turn. My brother was a pastor at a nice parish in Lincoln - months later he would be carjacked at gunpoint at a mission church in Venezuela.  He arrived home shaken, but  in time for my mother's diagnosis and rapid death from pancreatic cancer.  Mom at 69 left us shell-shocked and years later still dealing with the grief.  Dad has moved a couple of times since then, and due to  declining health issues  his address now is a nursing home.

I'm not ready to let go of that page.  My twin nieces were little girls growing up in Yellowstone Park, not going to prom and driving cars and getting in to hot water.  My god-daughter was in high school - not married and with a child of her own.  I had no idea that it would be so hard to let go of that single page of addresses. Maybe I'll make the new address book about everyone but my immediate family.  After all, I have their names and addresses tacked up by every phone in the house, and a copy in my date book. I'll keep that "M" page in a drawer somewhere and try not to look at it too often.  It represents a time in my life when I could fly home and just collapse on the couch at mom and dad's and just veg out and be a daughter and not have to make decisions about anything. I could call my sister at Christmas time and pretend to be Mrs. Santa so the twins would stop misbehaving and driving their mother nuts.

Things were not necessarily easier then, but they were definitely simpler.  Now, with this address book change, I really can't go home again.

2 comments:

  1. Awww....your piece is so heart-touching. My dear Momma passed away almost 20 years ago, and I still have her address books. Those small books are the names & the places of my childhood, and a small window into my mother's world, & relatives and friends now gone. I certainly would never part with her book...her tiny, fine handwriting...one last tangible piece I have of her. Don't part with your old book. After you fill your new beautiful book, put your old one away with cherished photos & mementos. It's a wonderful keepsake, just like your other treasured memories.
    A fellow Quilter
    Penny

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  2. Isn't it amazing to have those bits of her handwriting? I have old cards and notes from my Mom; some of her quilting fabric has little notes pinned to it that say where it came from or "this red runs"! It evokes so much to see that handwriting on things....

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