Sometimes I feel that so much of our day-to-day life has been digitized these days. And words, they have value, they have a purpose. Sometimes it feels like when you write on the internet, the words you write just evaporate. But when I hand write, I feel like it is a conscious act. The words, they live and breathe on the page. And because you are limited by space, ink, hands, every word has to count.
During the summertime my mom found a few of her old diaries from her early 20’s. We sat on the bed and read through them together. It was so wonderful to read the words of my young mother. I think back to my memories of my mother when I was small. I always picture her the same way; she has long thick black hair. Her face is young and glowing. Her eyes are big. She wears a long sea-foam blue skirt that dances in the wind. She used to wear skirts all the time back then. She laughs and plays with me. She pretends that the vacuum cleaner is going to eat my feet, and for a moment, I am truly delightfully terrified. She sits on the couch and reads really thick novels. I remember the covers of the novels clearly. One of them had a picture of a yellow meadow on it. She had a lot of books like this. Romance. Inside, the pages are thick and coffee stained. She used to read a lot.
This is how my mother exists in my memory. I often tell her this and she laughs and says it was not always this way.
But that’s how she existed in my 5 year old mind.
Anyway, we read these diaries together and I read the story of my mother’s life. I felt that it was such a valuable experience for me, as her daughter, to have. I was grateful for her writing.
I wonder what traces of myself I can leave for my own family one day. Or will they just google me and find the blazing trail I have left behind me on the internet?
No, I want something else to happen.
There are so few opportunities to handwrite these days. But I try to make it a point to handwrite when I can. And it has made all the difference.
Here are my notebooks.
What about you? Do you love to write? Do you love stationary too? What kind of things do you handwrite in your day to day life?
Continue reading “The lost art of handwriting and my obsession with stationary”
