A Letter ... and Treasure?

This morning, my mom showed me a three-page letter that one of our friends from Austria bought from E-bay. It was dated back to 1875, and our friend believed it to be written by an archaeologist. He said it might even include a location of a hidden treasure. The letter was in English, written in an old writing that was difficult to read at times, so he wanted some help deciphering it, so my mom printed it out and we worked on trying to discover what word each scribble meant. It was pretty fun and we did well at figuring out what the letter said, but there were still a few illegible words.

It turned out to be a letter about a Reverend thanking someone (presumably a friend or another acquaintance). I did a bit of research online, and it turned out that the Reverend had written many other letters about the parish and church. It is not quite clear why the author of the letter was thanking the recipient, and some of the letter made absolutely no grammatical sense, but what was clear was that it was definitely not a letter about hidden treasure.

Despite the dismay about the treasure (or maybe because of it?), I came to think about the time during which the author wrote the letter - and what he would have changed knowing that someone would read it and attempt to decipher it, if he would have changed anything at all with that knowledge - rather than the content of the letter. The thought that someone might read his letter 136 years later most likely never even began to enter his mind. Even if he did know that someone would read it all this time later, would he have known anything about what the world would be like after 136 years? Would he have written anything else or would he have written in a different manner? I believe that these questions will probably remain unanswered, and that belief is strengthened even more when I think about the gap between then and now. There's so many differences that I begin to wonder what I would do in a similar situation. If I knew that my words would be read in over 130 years, would I write anything differently? I'm not sure if I could, since I have no idea what the future will bring, since I know that everything could - and probably will - be different: our lifestyle, our technology, our handwriting (as seen when I thought about common modern handwriting compared to his) ... maybe even the language we speak and write.

Back to the treasure ... I was thinking about the power of words and what strength they seem to convey through their meaning and age. Maybe everything contains a bit of treasure in its own way. Maybe when you see a picture of darkness, there's a speck of light somewhere in the distance. Maybe if you see a painting of a desert landscape with a hand reaching for a seemingly empty water bottle, there's a few little droplets left inside. Maybe words, no matter their content, always contain a little bit of treasure and a little bit of hope - like that speck of light and those little droplets of water - although we might not see any at first. Maybe the treasure is right in front of you, and maybe you just have to dig around a little to find the X that marks the spot. Maybe - just maybe - all words carry more of a treasure than they seem to carry. As the saying goes, things aren't always what they seem.

It's Been a While ...

I would say that the reason that I haven't been writing recently is that I've been really busy recently, but that's not necessarily true. Before summer started, I went to Pennsylvania during Project Period with my grade at school, where we studied history in Philadelphia, The Quakers, and The Amish, with plenty of fun-time in between in which we bought heavenly pretzels at Amish stores, jumped into hotel pools, played cards with friends, goofed off during bus rides, took plenty of awesome pictures, and spent almost an entire day in Hershey Park and Hershey's Chocolate World. When we got back to school, we watched The Witness, printed out pictures, made scrapbooks of our many journeys, and had our 8th Grade Graduation, in which we received awards and 'diplomas', watched a slideshow with pictures of us from all the trips we took together, and said our goodbyes to friends and teachers.

So, even though you could say a lot had been going on in my life before summer started, but since our graduation, I've spent a lot of time simple having fun and enjoying my summer so far and simply relaxing. It's a good feeling, being able to have plenty of time to read, solve Rubik's Cubes and try to beat my best time (which I've failed to do so far - sometimes I can get within three seconds, though!), brainstorm writing projects, play computer games in the basement, reminisce about old times by working on making a Time Capsule, and - of course - eat the occasional ice cream! :)

This Thursday, I'm going on a trip to China, so I'll have a lot to do over the next few weeks. I'm just going to try to have a lot of fun and learn as much as possible! You'll definitely hear from me after China, but I might even write another post or two before I leave. :)

Talk to you later! Bye!
Or, as they say in China, 再见！
~Cora