Hi Everyone!  I’m Tricia and so happy we are together today.  Blogging is way outside my comfort zone, but I’m so anxious to give my idea wings that her I am.  A classic introvert, I’ve always loved “quiet” and “solitude”.  But life, at least the life I chose, was anything but.  With four kids born within six years, my life by necessity was lived in an extroverted world – a world of action, quick decisions, scheduling, planning, and…well, you get the picture. I’ve almost never not worked.  From the time my children were very little, I had my hands in something.  I taught elementary school, started my own business, returned to school to get a Master’s degree in HR and worked in that field for many years.  I retired, not once, but twice…the last time very recently from directing a local non-profit.  On the go all the time, I embraced this noisy world, and life was good!

Time passes…and here I am at age 75, married 54 years, mother of four truly amazing adults who enriched our family by bringing to it three beautiful and loving daughters-in-law and an equally handsome and loving son-in-law.  As if that weren’t enough, they followed this up by giving us 13 even more amazing grandchildren.  I’ve been so very blessed.

But I still cherish and embrace my “alone” time. My solitude is both energizing and calming.

Now, as never before,  I find myself with lots of time and mounds of curiosity, and a febrile desire to satisfy both.  Bless the Internet!  Here I can placate both my opposing instincts – my quest for solitude and my thirst for connections.

I’m feeling like this is such an amazing time of my life…so different on so many levels.  Liberating. I still can (and most often do) live in that noisy, clamorous world a big family creates.  But now, I am free to withdraw almost at will, and move back into my quiet space, where I can dream about, question, imagine, reflect upon, consider and nurture that part of me that I so willingly put aside all those years ago.  And this is the time I want to share with you.

You should know…I am not a writer.  I am not an expert – on anything at all.  I have no special talents.  And I lead a very ordinary, some would say, boring life.  I’m not that interesting…but I am interested – in almost everything to the point where a mere unfamiliar word in my latest novel can take me scrolling through five different websites!

So, I invite you to come and sit with me, around my table, and let’s get the conversation started…there’s so much to talk about!

I’m Quietly yours,

Tricia