Sentiment and Memories

“Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us." ~ Oscar Wilde

My members and my website, Countryside Connection, are so much more than simply ‘my business’ they are a driving passion that I find very difficult to pull myself away from. If I am not corresponding and promoting members and their unique offerings, seeking new networking connections for them or working on the latest issue of our newsletter, there seems to be a hundred other things demanding attention at that very moment (the demands are only within the recesses of my own mind, as my wonderful members are always so supportive and send the most thoughtful email messages that, of course, I find impossible to delay responding to them or telephoning to say thank you and so on . . . My Inbox would astound most of you but I cannot part with any but the most mundane, or the dreaded Spam that manages to bypass my controls as they are filled with memories and bring joy when re-read. 

I have been wanting to add to my new blog for weeks and always wonder aloud late each night at where the time has gone ~ the answer frequently comes from my wonderfully supportive husband and it is always the same ~ you have not left your office unless it was unavoidable (meaning impossible to ignore) and to be fair, he is right. In the icy chill of wintertime it is even easier as I have the excuse of wanting to stay snuggled against my hot water bottle which rests against the small of my back (my poor teddy bear bottle, a present from same irreplaceable husband of 28 years, has a face that is threadbare below his lovely eyes and increasingly I notice yet another missing bit of fur on his patchy, worn body, but like a child with a beloved cuddly toy from childhood, I cannot bear-no pun intended-the thought of another one as he is truly irreplaceable and filled with memories and comfort) My daughter understands this perfectly as we share our passion for beloved items with their anthropomorphic qualities so filled with cherished memories ~ it is one of the reasons Moving Companies LOVE us so much as I feel certain the owners of each company have enjoyed a glorious holiday following yet another of our expensive international moves. 

In the Bookshop Category on my website, I describe our family passion for books, especially old ones and the inscriptions from those who have possessed them in the past, and our inability to part with them. Oh, if books were the only items we were sentimental about . . . memories of those I love who are no longer physically with me yet always in my heart and my thoughts are bound up in so many items that I cannot part with, ranging from large pieces of inherited furniture to bits of old lace, a collection of buttons and treasures collected from sandy beaches I have explored. I have saved almost every item my daughter has brought home from school or created at home since she first started at nursery; she and my husband have corresponded whenever they have been apart, whether he was working away from  home at the time, or when she was at school, then university and now living and working a few hours from home. They have never resorted to emails, as she and I now exchange, and she recently revealed to his great astonishment, the boxes in which she has kept every letter he has ever written and all of the enclosures, from cartoons and drawings he created for her to articles and comics he searches through newspapers and magazines to include for her enjoyment each week. We are a sentimental threesome, each in our own individual way and I would not change that or either of them for anything in the world.        

“Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories” ~ from the movie An Affair to Remember.  This is one of my favourite films of all times and never fails to require a box of tissues or a large handkerchief close at hand. I have a very sad worn tape and do not know what I will do if our old VCR ever dies and I cannot find this film on DVD, once we finally join the modern age and buy a DVD machine that is! I wish that I could say this reaction was unusual for me, but one of my brothers commented at an early age that I was the only person he knew who cried at commercials. As you can see, my sentimentality really has no bounds.