Crumpling the notebook pages in my hand, I quietly walked out of the farmhouse. I felt wounded, but I wasn’t crying.  Earlier that morning, I had shown my mother a story I had written. Mom disapproved of something she read and scolded me. The pain I felt was a deep, aching shame. Knowing what I needed to do, I crossed the farmyard towards the orchard.

Our freshly planted garden ran alongside the rows of trees. After tearing the notebook pages into small scraps, the size of snowflakes, I dug a hole in the soft soil near my favorite crabapple tree. Scooping up the white bits of paper, I threw them into the hole and covered them with the rich, dark brown soil.

At ten years of age, I didn’t know a single person who wrote anything other than letters to friends or relatives.  Yet, I wanted to write a book someday. Who knows where I’d gotten an idea like that. The teachers at my grade school certainly hadn’t covered anything like the different types of writing a person could do, nor how to construct stories that had realistic conflict, climax and satisfying resolutions.

The desire to write never left me. Every several years I’d pull out my notepad and do some writing. The people who saw these first literary attempts gave me honest critiques. Being thin-skinned, their advice on how to improve felt like personal attacks. The result each time was the same. I’d throw my notebook back into the desk and try to forget about it.

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