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A thought on blogging

A while back I was waxing nostalgia for my teen years in Germany. I was remembering all the things I loved about living there and got it into my head that I should try to find our old house on Google Earth.

Via satellite view, I carefully made my way down the streets of Osterholz, out to Wahlhofen and around the corner that was the turn off to our house. I recognized, even from the air, old 17th century barns and houses, but when I came to the place where I thought our house should have been, it was gone.

I retraced my steps several times, trying to find my wrong turn, but I couldn’t find it.

Deciding that I must have not remembered some turn, some road, I put it aside. Then, over the holidays I happened to mention the hunt to my mother. “Oh,” she said, “That house burned down. It isn’t there anymore.”

Burned down!

For some reason in our minds history is a stagnate never changing thing. The house that I remember as a home could not have possibly ever changed, let alone completely disappeared. What happened? How did it burn down? When we moved out it was at the request of our landlord. The house had been intended for his eldest son, and so when that son became engaged to be married, we were asked to leave. We only lived there three and a half years, but it seems like decades to me. I spent the last six months of my senior year in high school in another house we nick named “Davey Crocket goes to Space Camp.” The house was ultra modern instead of old fashioned with sky lights and pentagon-shaped rooms. It looked like it belonged on the set of Star Trek, and my mother’s antiques just didn’t really fit.

Since learning that our house burned down, I’ve been thinking about Osterholz, Wahlhofen, Bremen and Bremerhaven again. I’ve also been thinking about how things change and that as they pass into history, they are only fixed and permanent in our memories.

There are many reasons that it makes me sad I will never likely have children, but one of them is that someday, centuries from now, no one will be researching their family tree and find me there and wonder who I was. I know that probably sounds silly, but after being diagnosed with HPS I feel some sort of strange connection to the past.

Somewhere in our family history there was someone else like me. There was someone else who probably looked like me and shared my health issues. What must those issues have been like to deal with at a different point in history without the benefits of medicine I enjoy today? And someday, perhaps hundreds of years from now, someone else in our family will be born with HPS. I’ll have a special kind of connection to that person, even if they never know I existed. Hopefully HPS will be nothing other a minor problem for them. Perhaps by then there will be a cure and they won’t even give it a second thought.

And all this pondering got me to thinking about blogging. When e-mail first started to become popular, I remember there being some talk of all the history that was being lost because people didn’t write letters anymore. Well, now millions of people like me keep diaries of sorts every day. While most of these diaries may seem average or boring to most of us today, in a century think of the sort of picture of our age they would cumulatively leave behind. I wonder if there is any historian or historical society out there that has taken it upon themselves to somehow preserve this type of every-man history? If anyone knows, I’d love to read about it.

Comments

Kathryn said…
That's a really good question about the blogging, Heather. I do hope someone will preserve this type of journaling.

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