The typewriter on the shelf was a closeout deal. The office supply store was getting rid of old stock –and this old behemoth, no one wanted. It called out to the middle-aged, women. Choices must be made. An typewriter for 99 dollars and some change, (ink ribbons included) or that brand new laser jet ink package for a whopping 209 dollars –plus tax –something, a working mother and struggling writer, could little afford.

She was reminded where her love of writing began. When she was no more that five years of age, she began writing her stories. Her first written books were about the Valley River people. People that came from all walks of life. One woman that came from Japan and wore beautiful Kimonos, so everyone thought that she was a princess from a far off land. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Then there was a man, that lived in a nursing home because he had Parkinson’s disease. He had a wheelchair that allowed him more mobility because he was unable to walk steadily.

Of course there was the Valley River girl, from a far off land that wrote stories, had big dreams, and loved to illustrate all the books she wrote. That girl was me.

She held on, to all her notebooks and the first play she ever wrote. It was about a girl that would rather write than do her chores. She got mad and left home because she didn’t have enough time (or paper to write.)

She looked back at the old typewriter next to her desk and woke up in her bedroom, knowing that the typewriter that had been a closeout deal at the store was really all a dream.

Next to her desk, sat the typewriter she wrote all her first stories on. This was her Grandmother’s typewriter. The one that inspired, on which she cried over, because a lost dream had been realized each morning she woke up and saw it sitting next to her desk.

All that time she knew who she was. She had always been a writer.

‘Thirty years of age– that’s not a bad place to start,’ she thought.

–And so she promised herself after many failures, this year she would try and would succeed. That dream and her family –the sense of the community that the Valley River people had– was perhaps the only thing that truly mattered to her now, as much as it had when she was a little girl.

The paradigm of the typewriter had finally been realized.