Five Secrets I’d Like To Share

Tags

Blackstone Valley, blog hop, draperies, Elizabeth Hein, Massachusetts, travel

I was tagged by both Luccia Gray and Noelle Granger to share five things about myself. I don’t have any shocking secrets to share but it was still fun to come up with a few things you might not already know about me.  So, here goes …

1. Someday, I would like to write a story set along Massachusetts’, Blackstone Valley during the Industrial Revolution. I grew up not far from the towns of Sutton and Grafton and Millbury and always knew they were old mill towns but didn’t realize there isn’t that much written about them until I started doing the research for my current work-in-progress. There wasn’t much readily available about the textile mills and wire mills of Worcester County. There was much more written about the mills along the Lawrence and Nashua Rivers in northern Mass. My grandfather used to talk about his days working in the wire mill (although the rest of the family thinks it was just an after school job when he was a teenager) and several of my family members live in those old mill towns that have become commuter towns for the greater Boston area. I am slowly collecting information but won’t spend much time on that project until I am finished with my current projects.

2. I’ve been a world traveler since I was fetus. My parents moved to Spain when my mother was pregnant with me and I have been taking periodic trips ever since. According to our family albums, I visited most of the countries of southern Europe before the age of 5. My mother, older brother, and I were living in Spain on tourist visas that required us to get our passports stamped every six months, so we took weekend trips to Italy, Morocco, Andorra, and Portugal. The family didn’t do much traveling for a decade or so after we moved back to the States, but once I was old enough to start traveling with friends, I did. I did a exchange to the Valencia region of Spain in 1983. Then I met my husband and the traveling started in earnest. We did a big circle tour of Europe in 1990, France again in 2000, and again in 2003, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Spain again. Some families buy new cars every few years, we travel.

3. Before I started writing seriously, I had a small business making drapes. It was fun for a while. I liked creating things and solving people’s decorating problem. I didn’t like dealing with unrealistic expectations and the necessity of hiring employees. The photo below was one of my favorite projects.

4. I have a serious pocketbook habit. Because I have never been thin enough to really care about clothes or had a high enough pain tolerance to like pretty shoes, I am obsessed with pocketbooks. I am always on the look out for a medium sized navy blue bag and matching navy blue flats because by the time I find a good one, my old bag is worn out.

5. I am a huge cardigan fan. Not the Swedish band (although I love their song ‘Love Fool’), the sweater. I have all types of cardigans from lacy cotton summer weight cardigans to a massive untreated wool sweater from Ecuador. My husband even lugged  a few back from the mountains of Bolivia for me. In preparation for this post, I counted up all my cardigans. There are 46 of them spread out all over the house. My favorite though, is my ratty old writing cardigan. I bought it in1992 for $2 at the Timberland warehouse sale. It was there because the stitching around the button holes isn’t quite right. I have worn this sweater through two kids and three houses. It’s a bit itchy and has a few holes now, but I love it because it is warm and just the right weight.

I tag Samantha Dunaway Bryant and Jason Feingold.