Erma and Me - How it all began...

Ten years ago I moved to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with my husband, daughter, baby granddaughter, and Max, a 120-pound German Shepard (who has since passed on, taking a piece of my heart with him). It wasn't a move I was looking forward to; moving from right outside Philly to the middle of what seemed then like nowhere, well, it certainly wasn't the highlight of my life at that point. The move was due to my husband's job situation; the company he worked for, for over 20 years, shut down and now we had to start over. Fortunately, Darryl, my dear husband, was offered employment in a little town called Lititz. "What's a 'Lititz?'" I asked him the day that he told me the good news. "Remember visiting Lancaster?" "Yes..." I told him. "Well, it's sorta around there." Images of cows and horses and buggies popped into my mind's eye. "Okay..." So began a new chapter in our lives.

To this day I can remember our very first drive down Main Street in Lititz; it was the day I fell in love with a little village that one day would become my adopted hometown.

If Hollywood ever wanted the quintessential "American small town," Lititz would fill the bill. Clean, tree-lined streets, tiny shops in historic buildings, churches at every bend, alleys here and there that have little boutiques and colorful flowers adorning windows or curbs. Then there's the park, a place to lose yourself in quiet meditation or to let the kids run til they drop. A pretzel factory, a chocolate factory, a wolf sanctuary, the Moravian Sanctuary...the list goes on. To me, I had driven right into a Pollyanna movie.

The point of me telling you all that is to make you understand why I wanted to live IN Lititz. Desperately. Unfortunately, when we first arrived there was no way we could find a house IN Lititz that met our needs. Remember, we had to have a house that could comfortably house not just my husband and me, but our daughter, her baby, and a huge dog. Bottom line: Lititz did not offer what we needed for what we could pay. Our search continued. Just a footstep over the imaginary line from Lititz, we finally found a house that could be reworked into just what we wanted. We bought it.

NOTE: I know this seems like a long explanation but for those of you who have never read any of my columns--which I wrote weekly for ten years--I wanted to properly introduce myself AND explain about the "Erma" part of the blog title. Here goes...

We moved into a nice little rancher just past the thriving metropolis of Elm (Elm is a cluster of homes, one "sorta-kinda" intersection but not one traffic light) and began our new lives together.

Darryl worked full-time. Kelly (my daughter) worked full-time. I stayed home and took care of Deven, my granddaughter. This worked out fine for, oh, about a week, at which time I began to feel unGodly bored. During the time Deven slept or was at playgroup, there I was, doing nothing to keep my brain cells healthy. And trust me, Peg Bundy I am not; I can only watch TV for a brief period without getting itchy to do something else and you can only eat so many bon-bons. Ten years ago the computer was just being introduced to me so I had limited understanding of just what it could do so that was not very entertaining to me (boy THAT has changed!). So I read...and read...and read. One day I found an article about Erma Bombeck. She became my idol. Her writing style was, well, not really a "style" at all, just Erma writing the way she spoke. Incredible! The long and short of it is that it was Erma who gave me the courage to do what I did next.

As I sat waiting for Deven to wake up from a nap, I paged through the Lititz Record Express. Having just been introduced, as I said, to the computer, I noticed that nothing in the paper referenced anything in any way about web sites that might be associated with their articles. Hmmm......... I had always wanted to write a children's book (which I still haven't done--but I did have a book on Lititz published) and had tried to put one together but never carried through, thinking that, "What publisher would be interested in someone who has absolutely NO experience and NO education past high school?" So, I dropped it. But paging through the newspaper, something occurred to me. Erma wrote as she spoke and it worked for her--big time--why couldn't it work for me, too?

Without thinking it through, I wrote a few paragraphs about the fear of flying and included a web site that I had found that was very informative. I spell-checked it and called it "done." Next, I noticed that Rick Reitz, the editor of the Lititz Record at that time, had an email address listed, so I emailed my little "Fear of Flying" piece to him. "You don't have anything that relates to computers," I wrote, "so I'd like to write a weekly column that does; a different subject each week. You don't have to pay me, I just want some experience writing." Just 15 minutes later he responded, "I'm interested. It's too short, however; write some more and send it back to me." Astonished, I sat there with wide eyes and my mouth hanging open. What had I just done???

The rest is, as they say, history. A few weeks into writing the new column I was called into Rick's office and was hired to do not only my column but to do feature stories and photography as well. I enjoyed those years and LOVED the people I worked with; we all became a great big editorial family. About three years ago our "family" was torn apart when the big bosses came in and told us that the Lititz Record Express Newspaper would be moving to Ephrata the next day. That's right--the next day! There were tears. Lots of tears. Life was never the same after that. I quit the paper in protest. Yup, I quit. I deeply mourned the passing of the paper.

Weeks after that decision I realized that while I still didn't want to do feature stories for them anymore, I DID miss doing my In Sites column. I had, by that point, developed a fairly decent following of faithful readers and I found that I missed them very much. I wrote as Erma wrote; like I was talking to a friend--and people liked it. So I called and asked if I could reinstate myself as a columnist since I could write it from home. They agreed. I have done that since then -- until now. I turned in my resignation last week.

I am hoping that my faithful readers will find this blog and continue to share my life with me. Pass the word, will you?