As I continued stacking and sorting, a pile developed on the table and I realized that, quite by accident, I have become a collector of shoeboxes...
You know a post about a shoe collection has no place on a quilting blog (but a lip balm collection is totally acceptable, of course), so what's really in there? Well..a long long time ago (oh, say about from 2003-2005), I used to have a lot of penpals and I used to get A LOT of mail..
But that's not really the beginning... I started penpaling in the summer between 7th and 8th grade. It felt awesome to be connected to people all around the world, to be 13 years old and "know" people in Sweden, Germany, Hawaii, Texas, and other "exotic" places, like California. To a suburban girl whose family didn't travel, getting letters from different parts of the world was the next best thing to going there myself. I had a big map of the world on my bedroom wall and would put stickers on every city I had a pen pal in. There is still a big box of letters in my parents' basement from that period. I wrote letters on and off through high school and college, but had stopped almost completely by the time I moved to Hokkaido in '01. The internet re-introduced me to paling and got me started on swapping, a fun but expensive hobby of sending booklets of mail art with each letter. I think by the time we moved into the condo in '05 I was a bit overwhelmed by it all.. and wanted to spend more time quilting. Costas was relieved that I had settled on one expensive hobby, and stopped trying to keep up with two (to give an idea, some months of swapping would cost me $60+ in postage..). I kept up with some of my pals on livejournal, but when I started blogging here I lost touch with most of them too. Of course now there's facebook- and the ability to reconnect with almost anyone in an instant. That's why I'll be heading out to eastern Long Island tomorrow, to meet up with Courtney, an old swapper that I haven't talked to in ages. It should be nice. Thanks Facebook. 
Posts
2 comments:
I can't bare to get rid of shoe boxed either...you never know when you are going to need one :o)
I was one to write letters in my teens too...that's how I met my husband! ;o)
Are all of those shoeboxes full of letters?! Wow!
So you stopped writing letters and swapping decos/slams completely? Yes, swapping could be expensive! And most of all VERY time consuming... That's why I quit decos and eventually slams as well. But I still love writing letters and especially receiving them! :)
Post a Comment