Getting started, finally!

Today is the first day of my blog, after many years of writing in other formats.  It reminds me that when my son was an infant, I started a conversation with him.  I said, "I've been told that I should talk to you so here goes!"  I guess it worked:  he started talking at 18 months and didn't stop for many years.  When he was 12, he teased me that I should talk to him then because "Next year I'll be a teenager and won't talk to you any more."  It wasn't true -- he continued talking to me.  And now that he has children of his own, we still talk.  


So maybe I'm starting a blog that will last many years!  Or at least as long as it seems interesting to me -- and others, if I may presume that others will read my musings.  
"We didn't know what to do with a smart girl." That statement comes from a conversation I had with my mother when I was about 30.  It struck me right in the gut, but confirmed some of my childhood suspicions.  I was born into the wrong family!  Well, not really, but that feeling of being an alien hits all of us at one time or another.  I have intended for many years to write a memoir called "Smart Girl", but haven't gotten to that one yet.  So I'll start with a blog by that name and explain the current project.    


The memoir I have written has no title, as yet.  It describes part of the year 1984 when I went to a conference in Belgium and fell in love.  The story begins when Walter comments on my Opium perfume as he passes by me.  That begins a conversation that leads to a walk in the woods and looking for fairies.  We spent the following day in Bruges, the romantic northern city called "the Venice of the North."  Walter lit a candle in the cathedral to represent a turning point in his life.  After a romantic evening, Walter and I left the conference and ran off together to Brussels to seek more fairies before we each returned home to our ordinary lives.  


Neither of us was willing to give up on our romantic adventure so letters starting flying back and forth between New Orleans where I lived and South Africa, where Walter was.  I planned a visit to South Africa during the summer -- winter in the Southern Hemisphere.  More letters flew with plans for the visit and more promises of fairies and love.  I spent three weeks with Walter in the beautiful wine country around Stellenbosch in the Western Cape of South Africa.  


In later posts to this blog I want to explain how I came to write this story, so many years after it began. And the process of getting the story and the letters into a format to share.