Simple Pleasures: a story

Every blog has a story. This is the story of how Simple Pleasures came to be and still is . . .

Three years ago, I might not have been able to tell you what a blog is. I’d heard of them, I know, because, when Jamie suggested I create a blog, I had some idea of what he meant.

Christie was on call that Saturday morning in June 2006, Cassie arrival was several weeks in our future, and I was spending quality time with Jamie, who was probably in the middle of one of his forever home improvement projects, and with Michael, who was two. Whatever the catalyst, our talk drifted from how to keep our out-of-state relatives current with photos of children who seem to grow up overnight to why didn’t I create a blog and post pictures there. Jamie helped me set up a blog on what was then blogger.com.

The first two photos—Michael on the slide (his not-yet-arrived sister was to master the “big” slide first, before she was two) and Michael in the box (they were both “box children” two Fridays ago)—were Jamie’s, not mine. The first photo of Michael with Cassie—their first meeting a month late—wasn’t mine either. I’m the hand keeping him from tumbling off the hospital bed :-) But I’ve taken and posted and sometimes blogged about more than my share of family photos since.

The blog’s name came with its repurposing the next February. I was enrolled in a writing class—required training for my work—where the assignment was to create a multigenre memoir. At the time, I also took several days’ leave to stay with my mother who was recovering from back surgery. On daffodil-cheered and contrail-inspired neighborhood walks in the small southern town where I grew up, I tugged on memories and, one day, remembered my dormant blog. And decided I would write my memories of simple pleasures there . . .

Simple Pleasures soon assumed a life all its own. I've used the blog, when teaching graduate courses in writing and in technology, as an example of how we may meld both in order to capture, to pass on to others what matters most in our lives. I've used it to process, as writers do, my innermost self. I've used it to hold time fast, to make sense of the world around me. I've used it to play with language, to prove to myself that others’ faith in my writing gift has some merit. And always, because I know that to be a writer I must be able to face and to tell the truth, I write who and where I am at each published moment in time.

The blog came full circle last week when I/we used it to craft the stories that would be compiled into Kimberly’s First 20 Years scrapbook. At some point a couple of years ago, we decided to make Simple Pleasures a family venture. Somehow Jamie, whose brainchild this blog was in its beginning, has yet to find, and accept, his emailed invitations to join us on the contributors’ list. But the door is forever open.

Simple Pleasures has spin-offs—one a spoof of sorts on my ongoing love affair with technology and the other (only one entry anyone but me is allowed to read . . . yet) is my thinking about why I am not a writer.

Many read but few comment, at least not here. I’ve been told that some of you don’t know what to say in response to my entries. Oooooh, does that mean I may be a writer after all?

Come back often. Read. Enjoy. And, if so moved, let me know your thinking about my thinking . . .