Probably most Normal People would have thrown these out when they made a move as big as I did in the winter of 2010-11. Not me. I kept them all. I keep little stacks of them in various places around the house, and a big stack in the studio cupboard. In a pinch, if nothing else is available, I can jot a note down on the back, but I don't like to do that. I just like having these cards around.
After we lived on Edgcumbe Road, we lived in four other houses, three of them halfway across the country. Mom always kept these cards long after their usefulness had ended. I don't know why she did that, but I won't throw them out now.
Although I was about two years old, at most, when my mother had these cards made, I remember the day that they came in, and I remember the evening when the printer man came to the house to discuss the design with her.
I remember so much about those years when I was two or three, remember it visually, and yet I can't remember something that happened a week and a half ago.
For me, the cards are a reminder that my mother once had a vital artistic and entrepreneurial spirit; and they remind me where I got those qualities. Over the years, life really kind of beat that spirit out of her. She stopped making art after her divorce from my father, but she never stopped in the Antiques business, even when that business was horrible, until other people's stupid decisions closed down the group shop she helped manage, and then her body started actively conspiring against her.
She never gave in and became a wage slave. That's something I have to repeat to myself now. It's something I've got to work for. If nothing else, these cards remind me that I have a legacy to fulfill.
-- Frede.
www.ducksoup.me
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