A Blog Is Born!

Today is Tuesday, October 13th, 2009.

It's a momentous day for me because it's the first time in my life I've ever written a blog! I am taking a three-part blogging workshop at the local library. I'm not very techie but I want to learn how to do a blog. It's very exciting to me to be able to share parts of my life with others, through writing.

The library, which is located in Western Massachusetts, is actually called the Berkshire Athenaeum. When I was a child, my mother (God rest her soul), took my four sisters and me to the library every week. In those days, the Athenaeum was located in an architecturally wonderful, old building that's still standing but it no longer serves as a library. Today the Athenaeum is housed in a new building, not far from the original one.

I remember how I looked forward to those childhood trips to the library. There was a wide staircase that led to the Children's Section and a distinct smell of wood floors and thousands of books. My heart used to pound when I started looking through shelf after shelf of books. I carefully selected the ones I wanted to take home. Leaving the library, I always felt incredibly rich, even if I didn't have a dime in my pocket. This feeling has been repeated thousands of times throughout my life. Even in the worst of economic times, a trip to the library has always made me feel like a million dollars! It still does!

Those early trips to the library definitely resulted in my love of reading. Today I have a home library, too. My husband built floor to (almost) ceiling shelves on two of our living room walls. The day he finished them, I hauled dozens of boxes of my beloved books down from the attic, carefully unpacked them, and arranged them on the shelves. What a joyful chore that was! Today, some of my most pleasurable moments are spent curled up in a corner of the sofa with one of my precious books. I have books on a huge variety of subjects from gardening and religion to interior decorating, health, poetry, and so on. Four of the large shelves are filled with just cookbooks.

There are so many things I want to share with readers in this blog in the future. I want to learn how to add pictures, too. It will be a kind of work-in-progress.

So there it is.....my very first post for my spanking new baby blog, Writing Straight From The Heart!