(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Bluesky. And her latest book, The Atropine Tree, is now available!)
I am freshly back from my latest adventure--a road trip to my home state of Colorado. Two days of driving there, a few days with the in-laws for a family reunion, then off to my parents' house, where our main goal was to pack up and clean out their house as they prepare to make the move into assisted living. Then two days driving back. There were two fun adventure days planned into the mix--one day in Rocky Mountain National Park and one day at the aquarium in Denver.
I was supposed to write a blog post about any cool stationery I found in my parents' house as we packed, but 1) Mostly I didn't find any, and 2) Turns out that's a super emotionally and physically difficult thing to do, and I forgot to take pictures of anything I did find.
But I promised Brad a trip post, so what you get instead is a list of random trip thoughts interspersed with pictures of fish. Sorry, Brad.
I brought one small Paperblanks notebook and one pocket Gravitas Pens fountain pen with me on this trip. I did not write a single word. Well, I did write a poem, but not with pen and paper. I texted it to myself in the middle of the night. It's about getting too attached to places and how hard it is when the places you love are so far apart.
A very cool thing I found in the attic: an old Topo Designs messenger bag that my mom used to carry. It's the original design of the Mountain Briefcase Backpack and pre-dates the Doane Paper edition one that I still carry to this day (it's literally my work bag right now, and I've had it for 12-13 years). How did my mom get this cool bag? We lived in Fort Collins, where Topo was born. Don't worry--this did not go in the thrift pile. I have it now. It needs some serious TLC, and then I think my youngest will inherit it.
Another stationery-related item I found was my grandmother's pencil box from the 1940s. It has her maiden name and the year 1948 written inside the lid. She would have been 18 then, and just about to marry my grandfather. There were pens inside! But just the freebie branded ballpoints you get from the bank and doctor's office. And a lot of mechanical pencils for doing crossword puzzles. It made me very happy.
I also found a lot of my mom's travel journals and flight logs, which I packed away for safe storage. Her journals are all written in nice notebooks, because I always gave her nice notebooks. And when we lived in Switzerland, we both stocked up on Clairefontaine notebooks from the local shop. Both our houses are full of those.
My dad asked if there was anything else I wanted from the house, and I asked him to save me one of his many hand-carved walking sticks he used to make from branches collected on their property. He gave me the most special one that he'd carved for himself. I couldn't even talk for a minute and I can't now, just writing about it.
Random lessons from the trip: Iowa is stunningly beautiful in summer. Home is lots of places all at once. Bears really like cat food. Get rid of most of your stuff. But not your journals--write lots of those. In good notebooks. No one is allowed to skip songs on the family playlist. Your kids will add terrible songs to the family playlist--not because they like them, but because they like to troll you. The Rocky Mountains don't look the same without their snow caps. The Rocky Mountains are losing their snow caps. If you want all the Estes Park gossip, ask in the jewelry stores. Your parents are going to get older. They probably still have their clothes from before you were born, and you can trace the outline of them through their lives, from closet to attic to garage, and then you, and they, are going to have to let all of that go.
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