My First orchardprairie E-Mail

Yes. I am that woman. The woman who keeps everything. Well, not so much such down-sizing and retiring. But I do still have the very first e-mail I sent after a business associate/friend helped me set up my very own, free, Yahoo e-mail account. The interesting thing about this is that I just thought about him the other day after going through some old photos.

And finding this photo of the two of us. First I couldn't remember his name, which finally came to me once I quit trying to think of it. Second, I couldn't remember his Renaissance Festival persona. It is War Troll. I know because I mentioned it in that first e-mail:

"WOW! I'm in someone's data base! Sorry I didn't reply sooner - I thot this was the test we did the day you were here. I understand the War Troll captured some poor soul at the Faire last weekend. Kari said they really had a ball and took plenty of pictures so I'm looking forward to seeing those."

And here is one of those pictures of Kari taken with the War Troll the previous weekend. If it looks like she and I have the same bodice, we don't. I borrowed hers the weekend I went to Renfest. These were the Salisbury House Renaissance Faires held in Waterworks Park in Des Moines. So much fun!!

Rich's first e-mail to me, the one I was replying to on May 20, 1998, was: "Hi. Just added you to my database. Be sure to check in the "Options" in yahoo. Neat stuff to customize your e-mail like signatures." Eighteen years and I still haven't checked out Yahoo's options. I'm sure they've changed.

Other interesting early miscellaneous e-mails included one from a man about an article for Ultraflight Magazine. His query had landed in our company fax number - re-assigned to us but once the telephone # of a Frank Griffith - and some correspondence with a woman from Scotland looking for information on her Dalgety/Dalgetty relatives in Adams County. I did go out to the Oakland Cemetery at Quincy and copy down all the information from the headstones to send her.

Possibly the best of those early e-mails was one from our son, Mark, back when he was living in the San Francisco area and his e-mail address was dangerbooty. 

In the beginning, I was forced to 'clean out my mailbox' because of the limited amount of storage. Then Yahoo gave us all unlimited storage and I became lax about deleting messages. Likewise relegating messages to folders. There have been times though when keeping all those old e-mails has been fortuitous - like when I've needed to go back to find something, an address, a recipe, the date when something happened - I enter a search word and there the information is.

I guess this isn't any different than keeping a shoe box full of letters tied up in a ribbon - maybe not as tactile or romantic - but just as memorable.