Bonny Glen Birthday
This blog will be five years old tomorrow (Wednesday the 20th). Five years, 1928 posts (this one makes 1929), over eleven thousand comments. That last figure does not seem possible but my dashboard is telling me 11,495 comments approved. Which speaks to exactly what has kept me enthusiastically blogging these past five years: you. Thanks, all of you who visit me here, sharing your humor, your insight, your warmth.
A lot has changed since I wrote that first entry.
The children. These days the girls are calling themselves Jane, Rose, and Beanie. Well actually it’s Jane and Rose calling the youngest one Beanie, but she answers to it. And then there’s the baby, whom we affectionately refer to as Wonderboy. Their ages are 9, 6, almost 4, and 13 months…I write. Scott writes. Both of us, here at home, in this messy office with my photocopies of 18th-century Edinburgh all over the wall and his comic-book-hero statues staring at us from atop the shelves.
I miss that office! Now I write sitting on my bed, on this laptop, and the hero statues are in storage. New comics art ornaments Scott’s office walls but that isn’t here at home anymore. And those little girls, oh my. That nine-year-old was in a heavy Jane of Lantern Hill phase and “Jane” was her make-believe name of choice, that month. Beanie’s about to be the nine-year-old now. Wonderboy has become the big brother. How can Rilla be the almost-four-year-old? How can Huck be past a year?
When I began the blog, I thought it would be a time-saver. (I will pause until the laughter dies down.) I was spending lots of time answering email queries back then, questions from all sorts of readers about the Martha and Charlotte books, children’s book recommendations, a whole gamut of topics. Not that I was (or am) so full of answers, but when it comes to books I usually have a thing or two to say. 😉 I had a primitive website on which I was attempting to answer the book questions, and I had begun reading blogs and was impressed by the possibilities. A blog seemed a likely place to post answers to the kinds of questions I was hearing most often.
What you don’t know until you start blogging is that a blog takes on a life of its own. It’s a conversation, not an essay collection. You meet new people; your world expands; you keep encountering new things to be interested in and you can’t help but share the discoveries.
So I won’t claim that it has been in any way a time-saver, but it has certainly been a joy, in so many ways.
One unexpected element of blogging, something I didn’t foresee at the beginning, was what a treasure this record would become to my family. Our stories are chronicled here, not just our major life events but the small moments, the funny ones, the extraordinary ordinary. I’m grateful to this blog for getting me in the habit of writing down these things down. Huzzah for the searchable archive!
But mostly I’m grateful for you. The 11,495 things you’ve said, and the quiet readers among you as well. Thanks for making Bonny Glen a place I love to be.
UPDATED! I got to Melanie’s comment below and let out a whoop—I hadn’t realized our blogs shared a birthday! The Wine-Dark Sea is one of my favorite places on the web: I can always count on reading something smart, thoughtful, and full of insight. In the unscientific labeling system that is my attempt to organize the subscriptions in my feed reader, Melanie started out in “thinkers,” quickly moved to “favorite reads,” and now resides in “pals.” All three descriptions fit to a T. Thanks, Melanie, for the way you consistently exercise my ponder muscle. Happy blog-birthday!
It’s also the actual birthday of my real-life friend Laurie of Seaglass Hearts. Happy day, my dear!