August 6, 1964 Jocie Brooke here reporting from Main Street, Hollyhill. Boring! Boring! Bo-o-oring! I guess you can guess where I am. No, not school. That’s not for a few more weeks and usually not so awful boring until at least the middle of September. That is, if you don’t have Mr. Smith for history. Then it’s boring from the …
If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk? ~Dr. Laurence J. Peter A writer needs a little clutter going in her head. Got to pull those stories from somewhere. But I did finally almost get my desk cleaned off today. (I didn’t show the corner that still has a pile of …
When I was a kid, there was a safe in an outbuilding at my aunt’s house. The safe was the size of a small chest and locked. Nobody knew the combination. Nobody knew what was in the safe. It was from the past that nobody in my family remembered. At one time, some of my ancestors operated a distillery. My …
July 29, 1964 Jocie Brooke here reporting from Hollyhill, Kentucky. Can you believe it’s almost August? We go back to school in August. Groan. We used to wait until after Labor Day, but then it snowed quite a bit one winter and we were still going to school in June. The powers that be decided it would be better to …
“He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.” ~Harold Wilson Things change. That’s the one thing in life you can be sure will happen. Maybe not every day, but then again maybe every day. Sometimes we want to hold time in a bottle and keep the world from changing …
“A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove… but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child.” (Forest E. Witcraft) Did you go to Vacation Bible School when you were a kid? Have …
Hollyhill, Kentucky July 22, 1964 Jocie Brooke here reporting from Hollyhill, Kentucky. Well, from Holly County anyway. We, Dad and Aunt Love and I, actually live outside the city limits. We don’t live on a farm exactly, but there are farms all around us. Some of those farms have plenty of blackberry bushes on them and it’s blackberry season. …
Do you like to talk about books? Well, then you should check with your local library or bookstore and see when an author is coming to town, because if those writers are like me, they’ll be talking books. That’s what I did today. When Scent of Lilacs first came out in 2005, I decided that since I had used my …
Do you like entering contests? Have you ever won anything? I’m imagining a lot of you shaking your heads. That’s why I have that “never win” drawing in my Celebration Contests. Somebody who says they never win has to be a winner. This time it was Brandy from TX. I’m hoping she doesn’t have neighbors who don’t like wind chimes. …
July 15, 1964 Jocie Brooke here reporting from Main Street, Hollyhill, Kentucky. I’m back from 4-H Camp. What a blast! I hardly missed Hollyhill at all. Well, Dad and Wes some. Zella not at all. But she was looking pretty happy when I went to the newspaper office this morning. Guess she had a good week with me out of …