Random thoughts and positive intention: Old photographs/hidden treasures/memories

One of the little surprises that emerged from our loft was a box of old photographs and postcards. Some of them were from my wedding, some when my daughter was small and some were of Ralph and me in NY before we moved to London. We both spent an hour or two reminiscing and reliving a bit of our own history. In this long-hidden box were also Ralph's trinkets, diaries and other memorabilia from his chioldhood.

Going back into our own past is so very satisfying. Every photo tells a story and every story brings emotional moments back to life. The evocative quality of these photos is remarkable. I was talking to my cousin yesterday and we were discussing how different communication is now that we are all computer-reliant. In forty or fifty years will we look back at computer generated images with the same nostalgia? Will e-mails be as poignant a form of communication between parted couples as letters have been?

Ralph and I have been married for over forty years. We met in a tiny guest house/student hostel in Amsterdam in mid August 1968. We spent two days together before each of us went back to our own countries. What followed was a year of writing letters back and forth across the Atlantic. We were both artists and our letters were illustrated and hand-written. We wrote to each other almost every day.

A year's worth of romance and a social commentary of our time. We were university students, politically aware and the world was in turmoil in 1968. All of this was recorded in our letters. At the end of that year Ralph came to NY and two months later we were married. Would it have been the same with e-mail? Surely I would have deleted some of the less-important notes to free up more disk space.

Ralph kept all the letters I wrote to him and I kept his. There were two ratty old shoe boxes full of letters in our cupboard for years. When we were approaching our 25th wedding anniversary I joined the two sets of letters in chronological order and had them beautifully bound into two large volumes as my gift to Ralph. It feels like something we can give to our kids, like an old family bible, something with meaning and history attached.The handwritten qualities of the letters make them very special and a unique part of past that would never have existed if we had computers to communicate through. I have never seen a volume of Facebook postings.

The photographs I had really forgotten about that caused the most laughter were a series of three photos of my dad waking Ralph on our wedding day. He slept at our neighbours' house in keeping with the age-old tradition of the bride and groom being separate on the night before the wedding and nobody had remembered to wake him. He was almost late for the wedding - surely a portent of things to come.