August 05th, 2021

There has been a whole lot of THIS going on here lately.  I'm not completely shocked, it is the rainy season after all.  But usually, we get the mornings off.  Not this week.  Which means, no hike, which means no photos.  Dang.

But Joy and I are used to hanging out together on Wednesdays so we decided to do an indoor project yesterday.  We have been, as I mentioned a month or so ago, slowly going through old letters and documents and photos and other treasures left to us by our parents.  For the past six (?) or so years these things have been sitting in boxes (many) stacked in the closet of Joy's home office, patiently waiting until we were ready to sort through.  Apparently this year we were finally ready.

We've been taking our time with the project and doing a the work first separately and then together.  First Joy went through all of the slides and then she handed them over to me and I did the same.  Then the slides that were left, we looked through together and decided what to keep and what to discard.  We did the same with letters, mystery documents, notebooks, diaries, autograph books and, finally, photographs.  

We finished it all up yesterday.   We found so many treasures! One of the documents was a surprise:

It appears that back on July 5,  1883, one Daniel Fleming purchased property from Levi Carline for the enormous sum of $5,325 dollars, all handled with beautiful penmanship by Mr. E. Copley Esquire.  I have no idea who any of these people were, but wow!  That's really cool.

Another treasure, less historic but far more personal (and highly valued) were these postcards that my Dad sent to me back in 1956:

In 1956 we lived in Illinois but my dad had accepted a job in California.  While waiting for our house in Illinois to sell we lived apart.  Dad in the California sunshine and my mom, my sister and I in a snowy Illinois winter.  I was six years old and these postcards meant the world to me.  I remember being so excited at receiving mail that was addressed to me!  "Really?  Mail for me?  Really?  Are you sure?"  and then starring at the pictures for long afternoons,  making up stories about what was happening in each one.  I have no idea why my parents still had possession of them and not me, but I am so glad that they did because now I have them once again.

There were so many wonderful pictures. Some sparked great memories. But there were also some photographs of me that I don't think I've ever seen before.  Pictures from long ago, in another place, and what sometimes feels like another life. Places I was too young to remember, doing things I do not recall.  If my name wasn't on the back of the photos, I absolutely would not have known it was me.  I will share photos of Baby Sam.

There were pictures of Baby Sam with my Mom (who always hated having her photo taken obviously).  This would have been in Chicago where I was born:

Baby Sam with my Dad. At our first house in Rolling Meadows, Illinois.  Check out that car too:

I had to laugh a little bit after looking through these old pictures of me.  Even though I look a lot different - taller if nothing else - there are clearly some things about me that did not change.  I still have a passion for music that obviously started quite young:

I continue to have an ongoing love affair with the written word:

Always loved animals:

Despite many ballet lessons, I never got any more graceful than this:

And I was always close with my baby sister :

Ok maybe they aren't treasures in the dictionary sense, but these photos are absolutely worth more than money can buy to me!  

I think Joy and I kind of dreaded the idea going through all of those boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff.  But now that it's done, I'm so glad that we did it. And I'm delighted that we did it together.   It was a wonderful walk through the history of our own lives. Yeah, I'd call that a treasure.