Evening Letter Writing

The other day my files got organized alphabetically instead of by date, and this draft of a blog post from several years ago popped up. 2022! I do a lot of adding and subtracting for the shop, so I can tell you, with confidence, that this was a million years ago. How much (so much!) has changed, and yet so much has stayed the same. These photos could in fact be from yesterday, so many of these items, the pen roll, the fountain pens, the portfolio, the wooden box, the mess of it all, are as they ever will be. Perhaps a little more patina on everything, just like the humans you can’t see.

Do I even want to contemplate what life was like two years after Covid arrived? No, definitely not. Are those terrifying months blacked out from my memory? Actually, no. It was treacherous for so many reasons, the shop was teetering constantly on the edge, the bubble of capillary clinging unable to accommodate one extra drop. But when I lift the corner on it, I can see the sun and his light, the sky and her infinite expanse. Blue envelopes and elixir sloshing around in magic wands, little rolls of washi tape with their sumo wrestlers and chickens. Where were my chickens in these photos? Who knows.

We’re gearing up to do some travelling this summer, another adventure! Japan, and again Taiwan. What an exhausting and glorious thrill to just think about. Planes, trains and automobiles. The oppressive humidity and transit systems from the future and mosquitoes and the views of the mountains. The food! The stationery! I can’t wait, and yet also I am soaking up these days here, the count down, the preparation, the sun growing warmer and brighter and longer, the existential fire burning out.

“We need to book the hotels,” Jon says to me, on a daily basis. Catsitters, scheduling vendor visits, passport expirations, whose names have hyphens, I can’t remember, there are too many little goblins, checking vaccinations, no one wants to get Japanese encephalitis while having fun. “Hmmm,” I say. “I notice that organized people use spreadsheets for travelling.”

I’m handling all these important preparations by concentrating on the details: do I have enough hair elastics? Which of these sunscreens will smell the best? Should I get my little cutie Junia a little matching cutie fanny pack? Chicken is getting more feral, more and more closely resembling Scar every day, while Tuna is getting more pampered, and the backyard kingdom remains in balance.

There remain a thousand things to do while we contemplate our next journey to the west: rehearsals and performances, bikes to be ridden, birthday cakes to be baked and eaten, cats to be squeezed until the point of meow, winter clothes to be laundered and stowed away for the next season, final school projects, and library books to be returned. Each of them a gift, a privilege, tiny, shiny pieces of luck I couldn’t even have imagined three years ago.