She Writes

I've been a scribbler as long as I can remember. As a child, I would often spend weekends traveling from Maryland to West Virginia with my grandparents. On the way, my grandmother would tell me stories of her childhood, growing up in the country with 5 brothers and sisters, as Grandad drove.

Those stories of a life and time so different from my own fascinated me, and I started writing them all down in the big block letters than only a child can do right. I wrote a booklet of family memoirs again in 1999, in my late 20's. Thankfully, there's a big difference in my writing skills between the first attempt and that one. Along the way, I made a lot of other attempts at telling the stories of our family.

Grandmom has kept every single one of those scribbled tales, from the ones done in crayon to the carefully word processed and bound adult efforts. She even kept the one where I tried illustrating. Of course, I'd chosen to draw an outhouse, because I was fascinated by the fact that my great-grandparents in West Virginia didn't have an indoor toilet until I was 7 or so.

When my 10-year-old niece visits my grandparents, Grandmom pulls out all those booklets and the two of them sit on the couch and pore over them. My niece has recently started writing down her own tales. Like I did at her age, she puts these little stories together and gives them to my Grandmom as gifts on Mother's Day, or just because.

She tells the same tales of country kids from another era growing up in the mountains. But she also tells her own stories - her trips to the cabin with my parents, her first experience riding a horse, getting into mischief with her friends. 

In her most recent tale, she writes of how my grandmother told her that she misses my stories. It has been a long time since I've written any. And so, my niece continues, she decided to start writing her own, so Grandmom wouldn't miss them anymore. She says "that's the magic of family," how she can be like me in that way and pick up that torch.

This little girl writes with a descriptiveness and flow and insightfulness that amazes me and makes me so proud. I got a little misty-eyed on Mother's Day, when I was reading her most recent tales. I was the kind of kid you would expect to sit around writing - a little shy and introverted, gawky and unsure of myself and my place in the neighborhood pecking order. My niece isn't that kid. She's outgoing and into just about anything from dance to swimming. But she writes anyway, and it is evident that she's got the bug.

 She writes. She writes beautifully, and with the voice of someone who will always want and need to write. And that makes me so proud and happy.