That Was Then; This Is Now

Ten whole years: depending how you look at it, this is a huge expanse of time, enough to bring momentous changes, or just a heartbeat in the life of a planet or sometimes even a person.

As the U.N. Climate Change Conference — COP26 — draws to a close in Glascow, with fresh new commitments amid plenty of serious worries, it’s interesting to note that back in 2011, COP17 was held in Durban, South Africa. Over the past decade, we’ve definitely lost ground (literally) and yet we cannot lose hope or the will to design lasting solutions.

It was the email from my brother Mike a couple of weeks ago that first swept me back to November, 2011.

He wrote in a celebratory tone to say that he and his wife Sally would soon — this coming New Year’s Eve — be marking their 10th wedding anniversary. “What…” I thought to myself, “already?!” This is often how we react when we get a delivery of something that makes us realize we’ve gone well beyond where we used to be.

Here they are, dancing on that dazzling evening:

My husband was the officiant at the ceremony and he prepared (had some help from my talented sister-in-law June in this department) two garlands of pine boughs, as I recall, for the occasion. The fact that these two people came together as they did has been a source of happiness, in each year since, for all of us who love them.

During the reception, many of us posed for photos taken by one of those machines that are fun to use for these special occasions. Here is a shot taken of me and Rob; at this point, we’d been 20 years married; he hadn’t yet been elected bishop.

In keeping with the spirit of a wedding, we look quite romantic, I’d say. And here’s how we looked this past October, almost 10 years later:

Definitely older, and here at least, not quite so playful. But very much together, still.

And meanwhile, our three kids have done a whole lot of growing up — moving from middle and high school on through college and, for two of them, graduate school and managing all the responsibilities that come with young adulthood. I bet if you’ve raised kids, too, you know the dizzying feeling this brings.

So why did my brother’s email bring me back to a couple of months before their wedding? Because that’s when I started this blog, that’s why.

It’s frankly embarrassing: I’ve actually been writing on this site for a whole decade? Looked at one way, that’s a whole lot of posting, and not necessarily a whole lot of progress. So maybe I also need to look at it another way, too.

Back in the days when life was a jumble of making meals, driving kids to lessons and practices, going to school meetings and church services, driving significant distances to teach, I also started writing in a big blue notebook.

It’s hard to tell how many years of pages I have in this three-ring binder, but at least a few. What I was doing here, essentially, was revving up my own internal engine towards eventually writing a full-length book. This — here comes an understatement — took a good long while. A notebook packed with handwriting does not a structured story make. It is a start, however.

Back then, I had a hunger for capturing what I was observing, what I was feeling, and a lot of this had to do with being the “un-churched” wife of a clergyman, the mother of clergy kids who sat next to me in the pew each Sunday.

Here’s one entry from mid-February, most likely about 2005:

Cora again brimming with eagerness to get to the right page before the hymn starts. I thought she might be disturbed by Rob’s sermon — beginning as it did with gloom and doom about possible war and North Korean missiles reaching the West Coast — but she allayed my anxiety by leaning over to me to say, “You know there are 20 fives in a hundred!

Knowing that I wanted to save these moments somehow but not knowing what exactly I would do with them, I just kept scrawling.

Eventually, I started trying to discern certain themes that arose from the scrawls; and one prominent and very broad one was “contrasts” — side by side differences. So, with the encouragement of an older brother who mentioned how more and more people were forming distinct interest groups online (this was a while ago, remember) and with these kinds of images swirling around in my head…

….I set out to launch a blog. Certain that I couldn’t do the designing part on my own, I enlisted the help of my Vermont friend Terry. She had her own website consulting business along with managing an alpaca farm with her husband.

Diving into the challenge on my behalf, she offered up a range of designs for the banner. Here’s one early one.

With Terry as my ally, I persevered, soon deciding on the word “panorama” instead of “palette” (painting–that was more my husband’s skill).

Here’s what I wrote in my opening “Welcome Message” — dated November 26, 2011:

An ordinary moment in the present takes us right back to a time long ago; a person who is known for behaving one way does something completely uncharacteristic; an experience we counted on to be wonderful turns out to be crushingly disappointing. We are shaken or maybe moved by the juxtaposition of things, and we try to get hold of our feelings.

For several years, I puttered along with my posts, all the while also trying to figure out how to get the blog to “feed into” the book, what I really intended to write. It wasn’t really until I enrolled in the Memoir Incubator at Grub Street, in 2017, that I began to shift my focus and, with the help of steady feedback from classmates, draft something like real chapters. Now, in November of 2021, I am still in Part Two of the enterprise: actively seeking the right road to publication.

Both the big blue notebook (beginning about 15 years ago) and the blog (now 10 years old) have both been important companions for me; for women, especially, it’s something like Virginia Woolf described in her famous 1929 essay, “A Room of One’s Own.”

So, today I will recognize the 10 year anniversary of this site. Thanks to Terry. Thanks to my beloved husband, Rob, who works hard at what he does and is also pulling for me. Thanks to my kids for cheering me on through the manuscript-writing…the revising, the querying, the proposal writing. Thanks to family and friends and subscribers for supporting me as I try to stay the course on this other, related — yes, I guess since it’s memoir, it’s a pretty personal — project. Not in the same realm of an actual WEDDING anniversary, but still maybe something…to write home about.