My mother’s Remington Rand manual typewriter sits on a cabinet near my desk. She made her living with a typewriter as a young woman, and then as she waited out WWII for her husband of six weeks to return from Europe. The old typewriter represents a connection to my mother that the electric one I learned on did not, and the laptop I use now can’t begin to. I picture her typing dictation at her desk on Air Force bases during World War II, waiting for the war to end and her new husband to return. She tried an electric typewriter in later years, and a word processor that my father learned to use, but the touch on both was too sensitive. And so she stuck with an enormous manual machine that replaced the small one (and is also still in the house). I still hear the clickity clacking as she typed her own letters to the newspaper editor and complaints of grammatical errors to Time magazine for my father. The Remington Rand is the header on my Facebook writer page and is the photo behind the blog link on this website’s home page. It grounds me. It brings her back to me.

I learned to type in a six-week summer course in high school—missing two weeks to go to a Girl Scout event. I typed college papers on an electric Smith Corona with an erase ribbon and, a few years later, my husband’s master’s thesis (twice) on a rented IBM Selectric. When it came time, in the early 1980s, to type his doctoral dissertation, I entered the first draft on a keyboard on campus where it went to a room-sized “computer” in another building. When my family finally got a home computer around 1986, I fell in love with typing for the first time.

The turning point in my writing life was the first writing class I took, in mid-life. It was a six-session adult learning course at a local college. Near the end of the course, the teacher casually mentioned blogging. It was 2010; I had never read anyone’s blog, nor considered that I might have something to say in one. But the comment changed my life. I didn’t have to have a tower room, write books, or aspire to finding a publisher to be a public writer. I almost immediately stopped keeping a hand-written private journal and switched to—hopefully—more inspired writing. When I moved “home,” across the country to care for my mother in my childhood home, I switched from writing about the garden to writing about being a family caregiver. When my mother died, I started another new blog about my adventures in the Pacific Northwest; and I turned my Daughter on Duty blog into a book, Mother Lode: Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver, typed on a MacBook Air.

A casual mention of blogging. It changed everything.

You can read my very first blog post here.