People who live in bushfire areas do well to collect their photos, birth certificates and anything else portable and precious and remove the lot to a safe place over summer. One of the items in my own stash is a suitcase full of letters, theatre programs, bits and bobs from childhood and youth, and some from my daughters’ childhood, lugged around over many years from house to house and country to country, taken for granted, never – until last night – never re-read.
Listening to the way people talked about their losses in February’s fires – that and our own narrow escape – led me to open the suitcase. Carpe diem, I suppose.
The first envelope I pulled out contained a series of letters from my first love. I spent hours in a reverie, musing over people and events from the better part of fifty years ago. Anyone my age can fill in the emotions, and some are very painful. All the same, this is a case of treasure.
All the rhetoric about Kinglake and Marysville turns on hope and the promise of a future and so it should. But it is terrible to think of the suitcases burning, the photographs and letters and the postcards and the childrens’ drawings.
[...] reading through the suitcase of memories – well, not ‘through’, I stop and stare into space and rootle around for more of [...]