Sent To: Memory Lane

Today I decided to start deleting the kajillion or so e-mails sitting in my sent mail.  To ensure that I wasn't going to lose any valuable information, my plan was to quickly scan each one and delete as I went along.  I found that I was unable to complete the task because of what happened next.  I opened up a fair number of e-mails and discovered how well those quick notes documented the past two years of my life.  They are like a diary in a way that this blog is not.  All these quick, blunt, and funny little blurbs, filled with the details of my daily life can be constructed to reveal all that is really me.  Notes that are written for specific people read a lot differently than a blog post that everyone stumbles onto when they Google the term, banana clip.  (It happens more often than you think!)  Personal e-mail covers the minutia that I omit in this space for concern that such details are too uninteresting, or simply not bloggable.  They tell about the journey, not just the end of the story.  Also, when I read them, I hear my own voice, which is something that I have not yet achieved here.  I try to be me when I blog, but I personally think I sound like a low calorie version of myself.  All that aside, after reading 20 or so, I realized that a lot has happened in two years.  It started with a lot of back and forth dialogue concerning the planning of hubby's birthday party that year.  It was a good party, but it will always be remembered as the party where there was something very wrong with my MIL, although we weren't sure what.  Next came the notes that I sent to various individuals, informing them that we had just taken my MIL to the hospital, and discovered that she had a brain tumor.  I don't plan to take you through notes about the hope and sorrow that followed, but my point is that reading through all this really took me through the emotional roller coaster, detailing things I might have otherwise forgotten or misremembered.  

Not all of my backlog of e-mail was of such a serious nature.  A lot of it was just banter, but reading through it gave me a feel for my relationships with various individuals.  There were also many notes pertaining to weddings.  There were notes pertaining to births.  There were notes about my own pregnancy and labour.  There were notes that were just funny to re-read, although they were of little consequence.  I'm might now be hooked on my sent mail.  Instead of deleting it, I think I'll be backing it up!