This is my 200th post on this blog! Woo-hoo! Cause for celebration. I have been writing consistently just about my whole life. And, yet, this blog is special.
Before I learned how to write, my mother kept a diary for me. When I became a “big girl” at five years old she gifted me my very own journal. One of the pictures I love most that I use as the icon for all writerly things on this blog is the one of me at five writing one of my stories in my little brown robe. At the time most of my tales sounded suspiciously like the Disney storybook I read every night. Still, my love of the written word goes back a long way. I have notebook upon notebook filled with my stories and thoughts and hopes from before my teens up to the present.
Still, this blog has been a wonderful new commitment to my writing. Although the goal is lofty – write every day – I meet it more than I thought I would. More than I have in a long time. The blog presents a new level of accountability – maybe some people read and write to me about what I write! – but also feels strangely private, like a diary that only I get to see. I struggle with this, particularly when things are personal. To write or not to write? I usually err on the side of sharing, but (especially lately) not always. There are stories whose time has not yet come.
So, happy 200th post to me. I want to call it a bicentennial, but I guess there is some difference between 200 posts and 200 years. Still, in the spirit of “two hundred”, here is a picture of me in 1976 on my favorite street overlooking Manhattan. It looked like the whole world wanted to be red, white and blue for America’s special birthday and I, not quite yet six years old, was totally mesmerized by it:
