First Page
December 1st, 2009 | 
Author: 
I love notebooks – especially new notebooks. Their pages are fresh and crisp and full of promise, ready for whatever you want to splash across them.
I remember when I was in elementary school and I’d open a new notebook and look at that first page. White with blue stripes, a light red one running down the left-hand side to mark the margin. It was so clean and tidy compared to my old ones – I was hesitant to write in it.
Putting my pen (or pencil) down on that first page I was always so careful, so very neat. I’d make my letters just so, and think out what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it so that I wouldn’t have to scratch any words out. But by the third page things were going downhill, until, again, the finished notebook would look like chicken scratch, complete with tears, frays and folded corners, rumpled cover and the occasional food smudge. Oh, and let’s not forget those awful doodles!
I share this now because this is my first entry on The Pear Tree Blog and I feel a bit like I did then, staring at the blank page – a clean slate, full of promise, and I don’t want to mess it up.
Of course looking back at those worn, old notebooks today, I see how they are so much more precious now, in their tattered state, than they were brand new and looking pristine, but without character.
Fortunately, I’m typing this blog so you won’t have to witness how sloppy my handwriting can get by page five. No such luck with the outpouring out of my thoughts, however. As with my notebooks, I don’t have a clear vision of where this blog will take me – or you, the reader. It might be messy sometimes. There will certainly be some tatters. But if there is any sort of goal involved, it is to make these cyber pages more interesting full than they would be clean and white, but empty.
And I hope to get to know you, dear reader, through your comments and feedback. I hope to create some semblance of a community – a whole library of notebooks! Come along for the journey – I’ll bring the Liquid Paper.
Thank you for your kind comments. In regards to online book reading, however, I must protest – there’s nothing like bound pages held in the hands, and the while the words may be the same in book and on screen story is most assuredly NOT the same story. I’m all for saving trees when it comes to newspapers and magazines, but I must draw the line somewhere and I. Love. My. Books!
There’s a fresh issue of House & Home magazine next to my MacBook, but even with all the rooms of inspiration (read: decorating ideas I cannot afford) The Pear Tree is where I wish to be. You may call today the day when the final wall of resistance towards all things E (rather than print and paper), finally crumbled. Next, I might even read a book that didn’t begin life as a tree.
D
ps:I have the same notebooks and, with some trepidation, managed to apply ink to two of them so far.
Nice start. I’m looking forward to following your blog with my morning coffee.
Oh Lori-Anne, I am also a notebook junkie, and as of today I have six pristine ones of all shapes and sizes because I find ones I “have to have” much faster than I write in them.