Yesterday, I was cleaning out the glove box in our old beach buggy to get it ready for donation to Cars for Causes. It's an old Isuzu Trooper; the perfect transport for beach chairs, pails and shovels and most of all....sand. The car is virtually full of sand. Even though we are a hop, skip and a jump from the beach at the end of our road, we often like to bring chairs, coolers, pails and shovels and...kids (kids who get full of sand). so we load up the beach buggy just to ride down to the end of the street!
Back to the glove box. Inside the glove box of the Trooper, I found a plastic bag with several copies of the 2002 issue of a newsletter that I once wrote and published. We had a ten year run and it was so much fun. I wrote about everything that came to mind. Hubby did a project in each issue, often creating and building a piece of furniture out of the old antique floor boards we took up along the way in the remodel of our really old house here on Cape Cod. I sat there in that old relic of a car and read the entire thing from beginning to end, enjoying the photos of things I had long since forgotten and chuckling at some items from the "tips and tidbits" section.
Emily's Country Quarterly was my baby for ten years. We had about 500 subscribers from all over the country plus several from Canada and a few from overseas. It was my outlet to write and, along the way, a diary of the progress we made in an effort to bring our circa 1724 cottage up to livable standards. I bought a good digital camera that allowed me to take great pictures and include them in each quarterly issue. We went from a 10x12 page format to a 5x6 booklet that was easier to read and hold. The best part? The letters from readers who seemed to look forward every three months to their issue in the mail. We tried to make even the envelope appealing, using colorful ink and graphics. All in all, it was a great creative and learning experience.
But things changed when hubby retired in 2002. Suddenly, I didn't have the "alone" time to think creatively. We would sit together in the morning and drink coffee, watching the news on TV and discussing the politics of the day. We'd have dinner much earlier so the work day would come to an end much faster. I used to write in the morning after he would leave for work, or in the late afternoon while waiting for him to come home. I am one of those who have a hard time doing things when there is noise or chaos going on around me. I need complete quiet and solace. Often, I would work late into the night long after hubby and probably the entire neighborhood went to bed.
Now with the addition of social media competing with my quiet time, I find I'm completely neglecting this blog. It makes me sad but I still wander off whenever I make an attempt to write something. Reading that 11 year old issue of Emily's Country Quarterly gave me the idea of posting some of the items I wrote long ago. They still seem pertinent today even with their age.
Therefore, I will now be plagiarizing myself, at least for a time, until I see if you like what I've written. I hope you will.
