little black diary

A few weeks back, my mom and I were venturing around an antique store. We came across this little pocket diary from the early 1900's. I want to say it was 1910, 1915 somewhere around there. We were skimming through the diary reading his little entries on the faded pages. There were several about major flooding in the spring like what we had going on this year. He wrote about the weather, often. He made entries of places he visited to. He marked down deaths, illnesses and other news of people he knew. He proudly documented purchases he made.

It was interesting to read through this little diary because again, I found myself imagining the past of someone else. What it would have been like to live back in those times. The times without facebook, cell phones, Red Box movies and an "app" for everything.





I had to smile, because I was picturing that old man being around today and having facebook. I was picturing his little entries as a Facebook "status" for that day. Would he have posted about his dissapointment with Miley Cyrus and her "twerking"? Would he had linked up his Facebook statuses to Twitter and Instagram? Or would he have been more of a Facebook only kind of guy? His little black diary is very similar to what we do now online except most of his thoughts were kept to himself. And eventually read by two crazy gals rummaging through junk at an antique store years later.

Fun to think about.

His handwriting was not the greatest. It was somehwhat shaky. Maybe he was suffereing from Parrkinson's. The things he wrote about gave us clues that he was pretty old which makes you think that he had to of been born in the later 1800s.

This little diary made me wonder about 50-100 years from now. When people are rummaging through antique stores. What will antiques look like? There won't be any little hand written diaries. Or Poloroid photos. There probably won't be a lot of gray enamelware left. Or old milk bottles. Definitely no feed sacks. And sadly, no books.

It seems like now, everything that we own becomes disposable at one point in our lives. Whether it's the carton of milk we bought last week or this desk chair that I am sitting on. I try to picture two ladies like my mom and myself venturing through an antique store 50 years from now checkingout my plastic milk jug and faux suede rolling desk chair. Not very interesting to say the least.

It's funny to think about because we get so caught up in the latest technology, new gadgets and things to make our lives easier. We buy these things, get a high off of the excitement of something new and they are often tossed into the corner never to be used again and taken to Good Will or Salvation Army. Will people a hundred years from now be fascinated by the junk we use today? It's a question I often times find myself asking over and over again.

I think the reason we are so infatuated with old things and antiques because they carry such great stories. You can tell these things have been used and cherished for most of that person's life. Things use to be so Timeless. Now, everything you buy seems like it will become "dated" and uninteresting in a few years. Styles are changing so quickly. People get caught up in trends not worrying whether they will like something 20 years from now.

Years down the road, after we are long gone, how will someone discover our existance? Our history? There won't be little black diaries floating around. Sure there will be facebook pages, blogs, ebooks and everything else floating around the internet...

But what if.

What if for some reason the internet gets unplugged from some freak phenonemon and everything we ever created was gone in a second.

If you were to pass away tomorrow, what would you have left behind as a reminder to your love ones down the road? How will your descendants know your history? Will anyone know how to log into your icloud or your computer to pull off pictures?

I have my grandma's old cookbook with sketches and writings in it. Alterations to recipes she liked better. It's one of my most cherished items. I also have a few of her childhood books with her name written neatly in the front cover. My mom has my grandma's old address book all handwritten. We have lots of pictures of her and my grandpa "back in the day" to remind us of the great lives they once lived. Those are things we will never toss out or get rid of.

I know everything has gone digitial from recipes to address books to letters and it is absolutely wonderful. Especially if you hate clutter and wasting paper. Sometimes though, it would be nice to have some hand written pieces around. Now would be a good time to start making a recipe binder. Start printing off some of those Pinterest recipes from cyber space and hand write them onto some cards or make notes on the paper you printed off. Especially the ones you make often. I have a recipe I made about 10 times and every time I have to get back on Pinterest to brush up on the ingredients. Wouldn't hurt to print it off...

Print off some of those pictures on your cell phone and put them into an album or have a book made. I can't tell you how many cell phones I have gone through in the last 10 years. How many pictures were left behind. My mother in law and I were just chatting last night about how quickly the digital era has caught up with us. We have the capabilities of taking so and I mean so many pictures that we don't take the time to get them organized or printed out for albums. What's the point of taking all these pictures if no one is ever going to see them and they're just sitting in my external harddrive? And what the heck happened to film? I know it slowly disappeared but it just seems like one day we woke up and it was now taboo to take film to the drug store to get pictures printed.

Welcome to the digital era.

There era where kids no longer know how to write in cursive or open a book but they sure know how to work their way around an ipad.

The era where young girls myself no longer pull out cookbooks but turn to Pinterest for a new recipe idea.

The era where photo albums no longer sit on coffee tables but rather in a cell phone.

The era of of battery power soap dispensers that break down in two months and no longer pump soap. Yeah, I think I will pass that down to my younger generations......

It's crazy, isn't it?

And it's only getting worse.