I have had a dream of creating a personal blog for several years. Other than a general concept of writing about people who have had an impact on my life, I had not formed a clear vision of what I wanted this site to be. I kept putting off getting started because I thought it was important to have a goal in mind first. The truth is, I still don’t know what I want this site to be, but I am jumping in anyway.
My marriage broke up right around the time my son Walker was five years old, which was shortly before my daughter Taylor was born in 1995. My ex and I both wanted our children to have holiday traditions to look forward to every year, so we decided the kids would spend Christmas with me and Thanksgiving with him.
I am blessed to have a wonderful aunt and uncle named Kaye and Dan. They have three sons – Danny, John, and David. For as long as I can remember, Kaye has been my role model and inspiration. When my marriage failed, spending Christmas in Dallas with Kaye, Dan, my cousins, and their growing families seemed like an oasis of love in the desert of my broken life. Over the years, it became a tradition for my kids and I to spend Christmas, and several additional days during the holiday season, with these awesome family members.
The north Dallas neighborhood where Kaye and Dan live is like many neighborhoods across the country. Neighbors hang Christmas lights on their homes and some add other festive decorative touches to their yards. One house a couple of streets away has a large, Christmas-themed display featuring hand-made, painted plywood cutouts depicting several Peanuts characters. Since my kids and I would typically arrive in Dallas for the holidays after dark, seeing the Peanuts characters was a wonderful reminder that a reunion with our loved ones was imminent. The Peanuts gang was the final landmark on our journey.
Back in 2016, I was in Dallas for Christmas and went out on my own for a walk one day. As I passed by the Peanuts house, I was overwhelmed with nostalgic gratitude. I thought about the logistics of storing, maintaining and setting up the Peanuts display year after year. I wanted the Peanuts family to know that their display had become a meaningful part of our holiday tradition, and had brought us joy for two decades. This line of thinking led me to consider many other important memories and milestones in my life that were the result of the efforts of people I never knew, those I only knew briefly, and some I still know, but with whom I have not sufficiently shared my appreciation for their contributions to my life.
When I got home from my walk that day in 2016, I wrote a thank you card and mailed it to the Peanuts house, and the seed was planted for what you are reading right now. When I shared with my son that I wanted to write thank you notes to a lot of people who had made a positive impact on my life, we discussed the challenge of finding people whose names I had never known, and others I knew very long ago. I told my son I had tried doing some searching online and reaching out via Facebook to possible contacts, but nothing had come of it. It was Walker’s idea to use a website to write my letters, and he presented this site to me as a gift, and kept paying to keep it reserved for several years as I procrastinated about getting started.
So, here I am, finally launching this project. I am still woefully unprepared. I haven’t uploaded photos to this laptop, so I don’t have photos to post yet. I filed away my first list of people to thank several years back, and I am not sure where it is, so I will probably need to start from scratch. But I am going to take a moment to feel grateful that my son kept this site going so that my dream of sharing little stories of how people have touched my life was not forgotten.
I don’t anticipate having any followers for a while, if ever. At some point I will tell my family about my blog and a few of them may decide to read it. I am not doing this for any other reason than to record my experiences that demonstrate that even in the course of an often challenging life, I have been truly blessed.
My first official thank you goes out to Walker, my wonderfully loving son, for believing in his mom enough to set this site up and pay the annual fees to keep it going while I procrastinated how to get started. Thank you, sweetie pie. You know how much I love you, but I will probably tell you a million more times anyway.
Love, Mom/Ann/Annie
Blog post content Copyright Ann Dow, October 2021