Tablets and Pencils and Erasers! Oh, Boy!

Did I ever tell you that I LOVE to write???

It started with me, at five years of age, pretending to write on small plain tablets my father brought home. Though I didn't know how to print anything but my name and some numbers, I remember sitting on the staircase of our home and "writing" stories on these tablets. Later, when I started school, I would bring home my school tablets and fill them with my stories.

Mysteries! That's what I really liked to write! By second grade, I was reading Nancy Drew mysteries and The Bobsey Twins books. My tablets were filled with stories, but not many school projects. When a tablet was filled, I would just go up to the teacher and explain that my tablet was full and I needed another, and I would be given another tablet, no questions asked. WOW!

Pencils were free for the asking, too! My parents had to supply the huge eraser as well as many that fit onto the pencil. Ah-h-h! I can still remember that special smell of rubber! And see the dark smudges all over my papers! And the holes in the paper where I had just changed my mind too many times.

Today, here I am, typing on a computer as I share my stories. But, you know, it's just not the same. There are no smells to associate with my postings. No crisp new paper or pink flexible erasers or dull lead pencils. But what's really important to me now is getting things down for posterity--my children and grandchildren and maybe eventually great grandchildren and others whom I'll never know here on earth. I am hoping that at least one of them will share the same delights that I did as I grew up in McSmalltown.