Last week, my brother brought over a cardboard box he found tucked away in a corner of our mom’s house. The box had a sign on it, “Valerie’s Stuff – Please don’t throw away.” When I removed that sign, the first item I saw reminded me that I’d been at this writing thing longer than I thought.

I pored over the top relic from 1976, Exploring Writing Careers – a student guidebook. I wasn’t sure where the booklet had come from, although I suspect it was from my mother and not a guidance counselor or teacher since it had a $1.40 price tag on it. Although the writing landscape has changed since that time, so much of the content and advice is still surprisingly relevant today.

I continued rummaging through my treasures and came across an old poem that wasn’t bad for an immature teenager during a tumultuous period of life. I even plan to tidy it up and release it to see the light of day outside its cardboard home for over forty years.

I laughed when I saw the cover of a spiral notebook from my freshman year of college. I listed the subjects as Dull, Boring, and Worse. I didn’t have to open the notebook to instinctively know those described my non-English classes. Sure enough, I checked, and the contents included disinterested notes on History, Sociology, and Speech courses.

My stroll down memory lane uncovered classes I hadn’t consciously thought about in years—English Literature, Poetry, Short Story, Oral Interpretation of Literature, Business Writing, American Realistic Literature, Shakespearean Tragedies, Journalism 101, and more. Yes, this writing hobby was not something I just picked up when I retired from the Navy; the seeds had been sown long ago waiting for the right weather and seasons to germinate and grow.

I read comments on papers from instructors full of enthusiasm who encouraged students to learn and to develop. It brought back memories of a fun professor I nicknamed “Hippy Dippy Dezen” who understood an effective way to teach poetry to college kids in the ’70s would be to study the lyrics of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” rather than study Chaucer. I marveled at the stark contrasts of those like Professor Dezen to others who obviously enjoyed their positions of power and criticized students without offering solutions for improvement. These reflections reinforced my commitment that I would never offer a writer useless comments like “you could have tried harder.”

Another poignant find in the collection was the final letter from my grandmother, dated November 11, 1981, Veterans Day. My grandmother had been one of the first to encourage me to keep writing, even scribbling next to the Langston Hughes poem “Dreams” that she liked his poem, but she liked my poems better.

The old box appeared at the right time and for reasons I’ll never know. The musty notebooks, annotated blue books, occasional typewritten papers, and a special letter reminded me—you are a writer.