Until relatively recently in history, most families lived within short distances from other family members, tended to settle near those roots, and usually married someone from their family’s wider circle, which in today’s terms and speaking geographically, was very small. Family and old friends frequently met via both daily/casual encounters and at the hatch/match/despatch events – births and christenings, weddings and funerals. Within their town or district people met and kept in touch through involvements in their churches and community interest groups. I often think how back in history personal contact was either via face time, to use that very modern term, or by writing letters to people who were far enough away that you infrequently or rarely saw them.
Our own closest circles extend to every continent, but are principally USA, NZ and Australia where our nearest relatives live. These are our children: Ivan and his sons Zih and Ronan; Anna and her son Gavin; my two sisters and their husband; Mike’s brothers; some in-laws and some of their offsprings. Almost ‘as important’ as those people are some very old friends from my/our youth (I’m still in touch with someone who allegedly attended my first birthday party) Of course, there’s a blending and blurring of this categorisation, as some ‘best friends’ come from later stages in our lives, too, which must be true for other people who’ve also moved about as we have in our married life.
In colonial times, letters took months to travel between England and the colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemans Land. All news, including the most important family news, was at least months old by the time it arrived; and if a ship was wrecked it possibly never arrived. As a young child I wrote several times yearly to my maternal grandparents in Sydney. Mum wrote diligently, and because of the cost and reception difficulties, there were almost never any phone calls. Grandma and Grandpa Croan flew down to Launceston every few years to visit, but even so, as a result we didn’t know them nearly as well as we did the other grandmother who lived in the same town. Entering university meant going to Hobart, 120 miles away, and for the next 4 years I diligently wrote home every week, posted it on my way to the campus on monday mornings, and Mum and Dad usually received it the next day. Long distance telephony was expensive, and only for emergencies. When we moved to Kalgoorlie and the other remote Outback Australian mining towns we lived in, we were still in the habit of writing home MOL weekly, although by the 80’s we were phoning our aging parents more often. Our own family’s lives in Outback mining towns were so very different to either of the lives we had as kids, plus there were anecdotes of grandchildren to share accompanied by the latest prints of photos we took and sent every 4-6 weeks. Mike’s mother Dawn said more than once that she preferred to receive a letter; you could hold it and read it over several times, whereas you couldn’t be sure you were properly remembering everything that was said in a phone call. If she’d lived long enough I think she’d have taken to email.
That was all then. These days there are various ways you can call and see your loved one’s face on screen, so many phone apps, and then various email and message avenues. God forbid the internet should collapse under the pressure of communications like home schooling, virtual business meetings and teleconferencing, telemedicine and much more. I add to the email traffic every week by sending out a brief bulletin I compile for the close family circle on how we’re faring in Montevideo, with news and snippets from local media. It’s a way of keeping in regular touch and, of course, writing about something is one way of mentally processing it. So far, while things are certainly really, really scary, so far I don’t feel 2020 is necessarily the hardest year we’ve had to endure in our 51+ glorious years of married life. We’ve had a couple of more difficult times; but we were young then, too ….