100 Weeks of Notes and Reflections
On September 4, 2020, I wrote the first of what is now 100 blogs on my website. I had been writing a weekly newspaper column for the Columbia Tribune since 1997 and before that for the Boone County Journal since 1994. It was time to move on to a different format. I loved the idea of a website and an opportunity to write unfettered by the constraints of a newspaper format. One that now allows me to include photography that informs my writing.
My first blog was a welcome to what I saw as “Notes and Reflections.” It described what I wanted my blog to be as follows: Like breathing, writing happens for me every day. Thoughts on a morning walk are woven into an essay, a column, or a food story. I welcome you to follow the blog as I gather threads and weave them into notes and reflections on books that take me to other places, on travel across time, on family stories past and present, and on food memories that sustain us in difficult times. There is always a story just ahead. Join me as I continue my writer’s journey and share what I find along the way.
Kit and I were still living at our Boomerang Creek home in Missouri. There was as yet no thought of relocating to the town where we’ve now lived since April 2021. In my early blogs, I wrote about summer tomatoes, grits and polenta, my mother Alice’s meatloaf, and my passion for wild persimmons. Blue moons, wheat harvests across time, and Stephenson’s Apple Farm Banana Bread recipe.
There was also a need to give attention to the daily struggles of millions around the world. When a small group of concerned women in Missouri joined together to address food insecurity during the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, I wrote about our efforts and a website/food blog we named The Common Ingredient. That website has now expanded and has a chapter in Blacksburg, Virginia. Comfort food stories and recipes have been contributed by visitors to the website who are now an international masala of people of all ages who are doing something positive to fight food insecurity…one recipe and donation at a time.
In November 2020, our son Hayden and daughter Heidi came to Boomerang Creek for a visit. We realized the time for a change. Sitting in front of our fireplace that week, memories were rekindled from our ten years living together in a tiny 1920s cottage up an urban canyon in west Los Angeles. Decades fell away and we found ourselves gathered around the stone fireplace at the Cottage again. Each of us mentally reconstructed that shared setting where we convened before dinner and talked about the day—for the kids at their West L.A public schools, Kit at UCLA, and me across town at a large inner city junior high school.
We also relived two six-week cross-country trips the four of us made in a VW Westphalia pop-top camper van while visiting Salter kin in Wisconsin and on the East Coast. Those adventures shaped us as a family. And as we shared our collective memories of that early chapter in our lives in L.A., we realized how much we truly miss being close together geographically. Missouri had been our home for 32 years, but at this point in our lives, it felt worlds away from our adult children and grandchildren—both geographically and politically.
In the months that followed, I wrote blogs about winter in Missouri and the purples of spring in our Boomerang Creek gardens, American presidents Eisenhower and Garfield, why we need darkness, the common Cannellini bean, and a call from afar that we could no longer ignore. In my May 2021 blog, I announced: “A call from afar struck like lightning once again, inspiring yet another life-changing move. Kit and I have decided to pull up stakes after thirty-two years in Missouri and are now beginning a new chapter in Nevada City, CA to be near family. I will relate the saga of our journey west and my plans for transitioning from a weekly newspaper column to a weekly blog on this site: cathysalter.com. “
In May 2021, I wrote about the territory that lay ahead as we downsized and drove west to California where we first met in 1977. In the weeks that followed the selling of Boomerang Creek and purchase a home in the Sierra Foothills above Nevada City, CA, I wrote of feelings one has when experiencing a seismic disruption to what was our normal for so long. After the last of the boxes was unpacked, we began exploring our new neck of the woods. There we had conversations with locals, investigations of what’s cooking in Nevada City, and the challenges of gardening in a world of tall pines and Douglas firs.
Thus far in 2022, I’ve written about the seasons, food memories, local and national authors, generators, traveling with cookbooks, the sound of silence that comes with living in a forest, the war in Ukraine, and Heather Cox Richardson’s brilliant “Letters From an American” daily blog that reminds me that history matters. This July, my writing turned to Salter family reunions past and present and to the publication of Kit’s book, Episodes in a Life on the cusp of his 84th birthday.
100 blogs in 100 weeks. Like breathing, these weekly notes and reflections published every Friday are my thoughts along the way, wherever that journey may lead.