My Grandparents, 1947 – painting by Hilda Cole Espy

Sometimes I wonder if it’s harder to stay in touch with folks now than it was “back in the day.” Perhaps it depends upon how far back you go. When my grandmother was writing to each of her children every week, typing by touch because she was blind, I think it must have been very difficult, indeed. And when my great-grandmother was writing to her three oldest, all away at the Baptist Seminary in Centralia, it was probably even harder – all handwritten, in ink on Sunday afternoons after church.

But the current age of digital and computer and email and technobabble has its own problems. When my hard drive went south a few weeks ago, Mike-the-Computer-Guy was able to retrieve everything. But there was trouble with my email file and I had to take computer and old hard drive back to him for fine tuning.

“You have over 30,000 emails,” he said. “That may be causing some of the problem.” And he suggested that he change email programs and servers. It was one of those conversations that I understood perfectly at the time but could never repeat or explain to anyone – not even to Nyel a half hour later. It had to do with ‘the cloud’ and ‘archiving’ and ‘storage capacity.’ They were all words I understood (sort of) so I made some hard decisions and am hoping for the best.

My Great-Grandparents and Their Children, 1895

The most troublesome choice was to change servers with the resultant change of email address. I loved my old address. It was the one I began with back in the 1990s when PUD was our server. My name at willapabay.org seemed perfectly suited to my sense of place. I liked it that people might be curious about just where Willapa Bay might be.  And I was relieved when ReachOne took over and allowed me to keep that address.

I decided finally, though, to switch from Windows Live Mail to Moilla Thunderbird and to go with gmail as my server.  My decision was based on coming up with an even better address (or so I think): sydneyofoysterville@gmail.com. My sense of place is intact and the address matches my website location at www.sydneyofoysterville.com. Woot! Woot!

My old server will forward my email for a while but I think I need to do my own due diligence in that regard. Perhaps this blog is Step One. As they say these days… “It’s a process.” Staying connected, though, is definitely worth the effort. My forebears thought so and so do I!