A Collectable Correspondence from a Catholic Love Story

Bill and I met almost 21 years ago at my first Young Adult meeting at St Patrick’s Parish. He was leading the group…and I was just checking out the Catholic scene at home, after returning from my 2nd year in Architecture in a city 5 hours away.

You can read our Catholic Love Story, if you’d like!

We dated for 2 years including 2 terms of 8 months apart, while I was away at school.  One of the terms was particularly difficult for me, but God is good.  Bill coincidentally travelled alot with his work and in my most difficult term, Bill’s work brought him to the city I was in…or another one close enough for a commute.  We didn’t go out on fancy dates when he came to visit…sometimes he just stayed with me patiently while I worked on my projects, anticipating the fearsome critique each Monday morning.  He drove me around, picking up supplies and moving my projects to and from school.  He even became my “glue boy”…tediously gluing the edges of those corrugated cardboard or foam core models.

We didn’t have internet or skype!  Long distance phone calls were a way bigger deal, especially with me as a student!  We did keep in contact by phone, but we also wrote letters back and forth. We’re both creative kind of people, so sometimes the letters included drawings, collages and homemade cards.

During one of my terms at school, my studio instructor commuted from Montreal (2 hours away).  Instead of meeting with us at our desks at school, we would fax him a collage of our work.

My letters to Bill evolved into photocollages with fragments of  my projects, photography assignments, other photos, handwritten news and notes.

When Bill travelled to the States on business, he would send me postcards from the exotic cities he stayed in…Boston, San Diego, Miami, Edmonton, Sacramento,  Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Buffalo, Montreal, Newark, Rochester …OK, maybe not all so exotic, especially considering the part of town he was usually stationed in for waste truck computer installations!

 We have a pretty cool collection of letters, postcards and homemade cards!

I kept our correspondence and for our 5th Wedding Anniversary, I made a special album of these letters, postcards, collages and homoemade cards.

I was a little ahead of my time…because it was more of a scrapbook, before scrapbooking had its own aisle at the craft store.

I used a photo album that we had received as a wedding present, and constructed the pages out of calendar pictures, gift bags and any other cool paper or magazine pages I could find.

Maybe a second installation is in order for our upcoming 20th anniversary in 2014!

…with homemade cards made by the kids!

I do have my Kids Quotebooks  and I have a couple family tradition ideas  including  special collections of letters  to the kids.

I have also started some Altered Collage Books (a treasure chest in a book!) for the kids, but I have yet to create a cool display of the favorite hand-made crafts and cards made by our kids. Hmmm…another project!