About

How I got to be sixty, I don’t know, but I am, and I have discovered I love to write.

From a young age I wanted to write, but by third grade I discovered I wasn’t that great at creating plots, which meant I had no story line to develop, which translated to me that pursuing writing was not a good choice.

Forty-five years later—after writing way too many reports/term papers for high school and college, and inflicting the same torture, first on my fifth grade students in the 1970s, and then on my own children during their homeschooling years, I had the opportunity to write a book about my mother’s mother.

I had found my niche—writing about people, a time and a place that were already givens, the plot already having happened.

I am now writing full time on the history of my dad’s parents, grandparents and great grandparents that grew up in the town of Eldred, New York, first called Halfway Brook, hence my site: HalfwayBrook.com

The Mill on Halfway Brook is now completed. I don’t think I should really have started another blog, but I couldn’t help myself, now that I know I love to write.

In the written material (letters, diaries, scrapbooks, etc.) loaned to me by my cousin Melva for research for “The Mill”, was a poem by my great aunt Edith Emogene (Emma) Austin titled, I am Tired. This blog was named from a sentence in the poem in which Emma, who was battling TB, said, “I am tired of the Journey’s Length.”

Life doesn’t cooperate with how we would like it to be, and sometimes we are “tired of the journey’s length.” But there are other times of laughter and craziness, though when we are “tired of the journey’s length,” it seems there will never be happiness again. Emma’s poem ends:

Bear on, bear on, the harvest sure,
Thou shalt know up there,
That what we thought so strangely here,
Was wisdom, love and care.

This blog is a random assortment of thoughts and stories. Some serious and perhaps thought provoking, others will hopefully be a fun read.

In the fun category, will be an occasional post titled: Super Mom and Hero. I recently found these stories written in another lifetime, in the midst of homeschooling four children, music lessons, hamsters, chickens, dog and parakeets…

At the time, I thought that certainly by sixty, life would be a breeze…After four months of being sixty, I’m thinking life is never a breeze, and it always has twists and turns you are not expecting on “the journey’s length.”

Perhaps the favorite post on this blog for me will always be the first one, which quotes some poetry that Great Aunt Emma wrote in an autograph book for her cousin, Ida Austin.

Snowy White Space

Thanks for stopping by.

Louise (Weezy) Smith