A number of people who have enjoyed my stories of all kinds of events throughout our life, have strongly suggested I write about them. It used to seem too daunting. Where to start? What to say? Would anyone care… or even be tinily interested? Finally, I decided that I really didn’t care about anything else than creating this record for myself and hubby Kanute, for our personal enjoyment. If anyone else should find pleasure and interest from my words… OK, great!
Still, it was only recently that I felt confident enough with my writing skills to begin a memoir. And I have chosen our farming years – from unofficial ‘apprenticeship’ working for a friend in Western Australia in the late 1960’s – through to our retirement farm today, in 2012. It’s proving a lot of fun (and a lot of hard work too), as I reminisce, and record, and then actually write the stories. There will be much editing and rewriting and endless tweaking – but it’s such a joy to relive the experiences, complete with joys and heartaches. How different it all looks and feels in hindsight. If it all works out as well as I hope, I plan to follow this memoir with others, of different times and happenings in our lives.
Some years ago, Kanute and I laid down the groundwork for some sort of autobiographies for each of us prior to our marriage, and then another for our married years. As we will celebrate our 48th wedding anniversary this year, you can imagine we have quite a bit of ground to cover.
Along the way, I had seen the idea of creating a timeline of life events, and this proved a great kick-off point, where we add to whenever another memory occurs to us. Then I found a template called ‘My Life’ and went to work on my computer of the day to create the three separate ones we required – his, hers and ours. This template has been a godsend for channeling memories and sorting them into various ages and stages of life – from preschool, to work, to courtship and marriage – and all that has followed.
Then we spent time ‘brain-storming’ ideas, sitting in front of the computer, with my fingers flying across the keys as the memories flowed. Just a few words or phrases usually sufficed to conjure up a memory to be expanded at a later date, and we organised our many memories under headings of the farms we have lived on or owned.
This ‘skeleton’ of ideas is proving absolutely invaluable. I have produced many thousands of words so far about our first farming experiences – whilst still writing elsewhere and performing all the wife-type duties, like cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing… etc. etc. I am enormously pleased and proud with my progress so far.
I am sharing some of the stories here on this ‘journal’ to hopefully tempt you to read the lot when the first book is published. At this stage, I think it will be an eBo0k on Amazon. Time will tell.
Enjoy!
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