It all comes out in the wash
March 9, 2007

On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com



the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com



On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com



On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com



On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com



On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.