The Minnesota Farm Woman

I always knew I wanted to write, but whenever anyone would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would always give the same answer of “a teacher or a nurse”.  What I really wanted to do was to write an award-winning winning piece of investigative journalism.  I wanted to write The Great American Novel or a book of poetry.  I just wanted to write and have no idea why I couldn’t say it out loud.  I do write that Great American Novel in my head every night before I fall asleep. I have probably written it five times over the last 30 years or so. During times of stress or if I am trying to clear my mind, I write little bits of inane, Dr. Seuss-type rhyming poetry. The rhymes must be said aloud to make sure they have just the right sound but are mostly done in my head because muttering little rhymes aloud is not necessarily seen as a good thing.   I was lucky enough to take a creative writing class in my small-town high school, taught by a fresh-out-of-college  enthusiastic teacher who could bring out the writer in anyone. He corrected with a red pencil and had an eagle eye for grammatical errors.  Both the constructive criticism and the kudos would be written with that red pencil, and I would file each one carefully in a manilla folder. He encouraged each one of us to live our dreams and I know that I was not the only one to listen.  I remember him being angry only once, and that was over us being disrespectful of another teacher.  I hope we listened then, too.  I took a journalism class from him the next year, and although I didn’t win any awards, I learned how to write for a newspaper.  We listened and we wrote.  We wrote and we learned. My teacher was a very good writer, and I often wondered why he didn’t take up the craft himself rather than teach a bunch of noisy high school kids who didn’t always want to listen. When I graduated, he wrote a note in my yearbook, telling me to keep writing.  Every so often I still page through that old yearbook and read his note, a paragraph squeezed between good luck wishes and silly notes from classmates, and I smile.  I wasn’t the most intelligent one in my class and I was definitely not the most athletic, but I could write, and somebody noticed. I have an old trunk that we have dragged from state to state that is  filled with photo albums, yearbooks and memories.  In it you will find an old manilla envelope filled with a high-school girl’s poems and prose, some of which have red pencil marks across the top. You see, I saved every one of them. I started out in college to be a teacher, but changed my mind halfway through and became a nurse.  That’s not all that I do, though. I am a nurse AND a writer. I write a newspaper column, an internet blog and a Great American Novel in my head every night before I go to sleep. Nursing has been a fulfilling career and pays the bills. Writing is what I do for me.  My former teacher retired a few years ago and still lives in the area.  You might think that with his talent he is spending his retirement years writing his own Great American Novel, but I don’t think he has the time. I hear that he is back at the high school doing some substitute teaching. I think we are both doing exactly what we were meant to do all along. Stand up and take a bow, Mike Nynas. The kudos are for you this time. Thank you.