Sept. 18, 2016

All the stories

we didn't tell

By Jenny Morris

A year ago, Scott turned to me and said, “Let’s start a blog”— or something like that.

As I agreed to his suggestion, my only stipulation was that we actually populated the blog with content — no anemic once-a-quarter postings and no illustrations copied from the Internet.

Within a few weeks, we had fallen into a twice-weekly writing routine. Our goal was to post 104 entries in one year’s time. And I suddenly understood a staple Scott lived with daily in his life as a newsprint journalist: the pressures of a deadline. A self-imposed deadline, as Scott often pointed out, but still a deadline.

This post marks our 104th entry to our blog. We’ve had fun sharing the challenges and humor of our past year with readers. We thrilled to “likes” on our Facebook page (who doesn’t want to be liked?) and moaned when something we wrote (usually I was the culprit) was misunderstood.

Some posts were easy to write and almost cathartic. Who can’t relate to the woes of car ownership? To twist the old saw: can’t live with ‘em and it’s counterproductive to shoot ‘em.

Or the frustrations of parenting six children. See comment on cars above.

Other posts surprised us. We grew up in a South crawling away from the noxious gas of racism. How did we reconcile our love for the South, blighted heritage and all, and our hate for some of its practices? And how did we write about it for all our friends to see?

And believe it or not, there are plenty of stories we didn’t tell. But you won’t hear them any time soon.

We’re taking some time off from blogging for the next few weeks to organize our website. Far from anemic, our blog can be overwhelming for a first-time visitor confronted with a sprawling list of past blog titles. We want to classify our posts in categories.

So, for example, if you want to find a nature hike Scott recommends, complete with “if you go” information, you can click on that section of the blog and not have to remember its title.

We’ll still post from time to time. (Friday night at a high school football game I made notes on all the ways we’ve failed Child No. 6 as parents. The finished product will probably make the blog soon.) And we’ve paid for our website through 2018. So we’re still at scottandjennymorris.com if you want to come by for a visit. If you can’t find us, come back some other time. We’re probably just off-line cleaning up the place.