Born To Blog

Remember the song “Born to be Wild?” Well, take out the “be wild” and substitute the word “blog” and you’ve got a musical description of this nana. Some nanas were born to knit. Some were born to cook. Still others, like me, got plugged in, logged on and launched into cyber space.

Perhaps I’m born to blog because I love writing so much. From the time I wrote my first poem (6th grade) until I graduated from high school, my desire to write kept growing. About the only thing I didn’t like writing was term papers during my college years.

Writing connects generations in a way that other methods of communication can’t. Pictures are great but if you don’t know who the pictures are of they don’t mean much. When I was eighteen years old I went away to college and suffered a huge dose of homesickness. This was 1974, long before computers were used for instant messaging and email. My mom and I talked on the phone frequently but she wrote me long letters. When she died in 1990 of colon cancer (she was only 51) those letters became one of my most prized possessions. If I want to hear her voice all I have to do is read them.

I also have some old letters that my grandfather wrote to my grandmother when they were courting back during the Great Depression. From them I got a glimpse of my grandparents that allowed me to see them like they were as young adults.

Blogging is not the same as letter writing. There’s something about a person’s personal handwriting that warms the heart in a way that typing can’t accomplish. But words are words and whether they are printed or handwritten, if they are recorded in some way they can be kept and treasured.

I encourage you to write. Whether you blog or not, that’s up to you, but write your children and grandchildren. Someday they will be glad you did.

Teresa Bell Kindred writes regularly over at NanaHood.com