Old Papers

Last night I stumbled upon something I'd almost forgotten: a thick stack of hard copies of old email dating back to 1998. Of course, I've long since gotten in the habit of saving all my email in perpetuity on my hard drive; but back in those days I didn't yet have a home Internet connection (long story), and the webmail I accessed from a library computer had limited storage. Hence this huge stack of paper: I think I've very rarely discarded any email I've sent or received since my very first email account with Excite.com in January 1998.

Odd, the things we lay aside and almost forget, until we stumble upon them anew.