Thread Counts

I’ve been going over personal correspondence from my life. My purpose is to fill in memory gaps on a longer piece I’m writing about my mother. You’ll see it here on the blog soon.

I kept every letter and card that I felt at the time mattered.  Mostly letters I received. But also letters I sent to my mother and father, sisters, grandparents and friends that made it back into my possession… somehow.

The letters stretch from my birth (congratulations received by my parents upon my entrance to the world) to more recent times.  What they have in common is that either I, or my correspondents, thought that I might want to read them again. When? Well… now.

And it is now, even now, that their value is realized.  For they are a different kind of memory. A memory that demands an assessment of continuity.  How am I similar to that boy of 8? That teen?  That man of 29?  Who was I … that still exists?

In the reading, there are certain truths of my identity.  How I became the me that I am now.

We measure the quality of sheets, by a thread count. For keeping the thread… counts.