Love Letters

Recently I inherited a shopping bag full of postcards, notes, and letters I'd written to my parents when I was young. It seems like my folks kept everything I ever sent them:

It was odd to once again see my very young, schoolgirl handwriting, so different from my angular, jumbled hand now:

I was 10 when I wrote this postcard to my best friend while on an epic trip my family took to Europe. I remember being obsessed with "Romeo and Juliet" about this time:

In the jumble of notes, there is a valentine I made my folks when I was an adolescent. Not very accomplished, but heartfelt:

And a note I wrote as a teen, detailing when I'd be home, and where I'm going, and can I please have the car? Ha ha!

There's a newspaper clipping of me from a college dance performance:

 (Oh, what a flat tummy I had back then!)

There are silly scribbles:

And housekeeping questions. This one makes me smile: Long-distance phone calls were expensive when I went to college. It was cheaper to dash off a postcard:

Going through the trove of old letters, I recognize stationery I used to have that I loved:

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I recognize the typeface of my beloved electric typewriter, upon which I banged out oh, so many papers for my English major:

This one is interesting. I wrote it the first year of college, right before my folks met The Hubby (back then he was just The Boyfriend). They didn't think much of him at first!:

In this postcard, I'm in college, asking for more money (a typical request!) and complaining about the high cost of medicine--a whopping $6.10 for something to treat a back injury I sustained. Hah! What a difference between then and now:

It's a real gift, having all these cards, notes, and letters back in my hands again after so many years. I look at them and marvel at how much things have changed.

Well, most things.

That back injury still plagues me to this day.