I’ve been cleaning and reorganizing various areas of my studio. It’s something I had planned to work on over the summer, but other projects took priority (and my time.)
Many years ago, I created simple display racks for postcards, photos, notes, and various ephemera. I aim to update/swap these items a few times a year, but when I started taking down the current display, it was obvious these items hadn’t been touched in quite a while...
If you’re curious, the racks are strips of aluminum C channel from the hardware store. (I’ve found 4-foot and 8-foot pieces of it at Lowe’s and Home Depot.) After painting long, thin strips of foam core or mat board the same color as my wall, I glued the painted boards to the inside of one side of the aluminum C channel. After it dried, I attached it to my wall by nailing it through the mat board, not the aluminum, as seen in the below photo. The racks are very light, and I only keep paper and unframed items in them, so I don’t worry about anything falling.
I think it's an easy, clean-looking alternative to a pin/cork board for displaying photos, cards, or prints. I do recommend having a little wall putty around in case a tall photo doesn’t want to stay upright or starts to bend forward.
Anyway, back to the task of cleaning. I have an plastic tub in the corner filled with memories. It has all the postcards I’ve collected on vacations, cards I wanted to keep from birthdays or holidays, favorite photos, quotes I’ve clipped from magazines or calendars, etc… and as I started thumbing through to see what items I might want to swap in/out of my racks, I stumbled upon a stack of old letters from friends and family.
When I imagine the days when people wrote letters my mind thinks of “olden times”, like years ago when my grandparents were young. And yet there I was looking through a stack of letters, some typed and some hand-written, mostly from my college days. And I’m not THAT old, while smartphones and social media weren’t a thing yet, we did have email and Nokia flip phones for "emergencies".
As I sat on the floor of my studio reading the letters, I was struck by the fact that my friends/family and I used to write actual letters/cards to each other somewhat regularly. But, I had nearly forgotten this reality.
These days I may struggle to return text messages from friends. And yes, life is different now. I have kids and a husband and plenty competing for my time. But it made me wonder…. for how easy it is to communicate and connect thanks to today’s technologies…. are we? Maybe it’s time to start writing letters again.