Curtiss Ann Matlock's Blog

I started back in January.

Was I being silly? I was after all simply an old granny writer. Would I be able to keep it up? The investment of time and energy, both in short supply, held me back. Also, I was too inhibited to investigate the gym by myself. (She who hauls her camper all over backroads was inhibited to walk into a gym.)

But then my teenage granddaughter came to visit. She knows about such things.

“Sure, I’ll go with you, Nana.”

She walked through the gym and pointed ou...

I am reading Ancestors, by William Maxwell. Or I should confess I am skimming a lot of it, because it does get boring. It is about Maxwell’s family genealogy, and likely only published in 1971 because he was a celebrated author and fiction editor of the New Yorker Magazine for thirty-nine years. Wikipedia lists his genre as domestic realism. That hooked me, because that is my favorite thing to read and to write about.

I started on Maxwell when I found on my own bookshelf a book of his short ...

Over the past ten months, I have enjoyed a camping trip about once a month. Each time I head out of my driveway in my truck pulling the camper, with Faith in the back seat, I am amazed. How in the world can I be doing this again?

When I bought my first camper, I imagined I would do the camping thing for three or four years, surely no more than five, and then likely be ‘too old’. Yet, here I am still doing it at the age of seventy-three. And I know other women my age who are also seasoned girl...

Black night wrapped around our group of twenty camper girls huddled in camp chairs around the flaming campfire. Conversation, laced with laughter, ranged from memories of camping escapades to how to call owls to songs long forgotten and brought up on cell phones.

The discussion turned to books and various favorites, and then a quiet voice said the name of Catherine Cookson.

“You’ve read Catherine Cookson, too?”

“Yes. I think I have one of her books now back in my camper– The Black ...

A few weeks back my son asked, “How much longer do you think you’re going to be RVing?”

My response was laughter, and, “Honey, I never thought I’d still be doing it now.”

But I am and having a bang-up time. I rang in start of 2025 camping beneath tall trees along the Alabama River at Isaac Creek Campground. I joined a group of women campers spanning ages forty-four to over seventy-four, who came in their campers and RVs to spend time chatting and laughing around campfires, s...

Happy New Year! I have done what I do each year at this time — choose an intention on which to focus for the coming year. I guess I’ve made it a habit, and I’m delighted at that.

Last year my guiding words of intention were Choose Life. Of course I forgot the phrase about halfway through the year, but when I look back, I see that I did indeed choose life. I traveled and camped–found a new campground I adore and cultivated new friendships with fellow campers. I accomplished repairs on my hous...

I’ve been camping and gardening and building and researching my family genealogy and crocheting. Everything but writing. There has been plenty to write about–heaven knows I generally always have something to say–yet even my journal lay unopened for days on end. I have been living life rather than writing about it, or even speaking much about it. I had no words that needed expressing. I fell silent.

Someone suggested to me the word fallow.

There is the old term fallow ground. This is when ...

As I started to edit this post, I realized the date, September 11, which always makes me hear in my mind President Roosevelt’s voice, speaking of the Pearl Harbor bombing, saying, “A day that will live in infamy.” I would say that 9/11 qualifies for the same. From the vantage point of my years and knowledge of history now, I realize that we, as humanity, have had many, many days that live in infamy, the painful and heartbreaking results lingering generations after.

The entire American Civil ...

Faith and I went all the way to Fall Creek Falls State Park in Tennessee, and guess what–the famous Falls were mostly dry.

That fact seemed of little consequence because of the beauty of the land. Even viewed from racing along the interstate highway, the green hills and mountains of Tennessee are awe inspiring. It truly is as the song says the “purple mountains majesty.” I found the fact awe inspiring that I drove and saw such...

Faith and I are on the road again, heading north. Our ultimate destination will be a gathering of Girl Campers in Tennessee. But with Alabama being such a long state, we’ve come halfway and are stopped at Oak Mountain State Park. Oh, I am enjoying delightful cooler temperatures!

As I was backing the camper into place, and in a rather zigzag manner that I sometimes do, a kind man came over to help me. He voiced surprised that I was doing this by myself, and that I didn’t have a ...