I was fifty years old when I read the small article in the Asheville Citizen Times newspaper: Tell It Like It Is: Writing for Women Over Fifty. The article said an Asheville author, Peggy Tabor Millin, was offering writing classes from her home in Asheville, less than an hour away from my then home in Brevard, North Carolina. The weekly classes were 21/2 hours in length and lasted for 6 weeks and fit into my limited budget. Classes were limited to 12 participants.

How bad can it be? Just 6 weeks-6 trips- and in a small group in an informal setting. The price was right and so was the timing. I needed something. A change from the exhausting pace of caregiving: two aunts in assisted living, Dad in a retirement home and two sons I was raising alone following the death of my husband. I reckoned I could work in the classes in between caregiving trips to assisted living facilities and high school after school tennis team practices.

I needed to carve out time and extricate myself- if only for a couple of hours a week- from my crazy. busy life I’d created of caregiving. If I left the house in Brevard at noon I could be in Asheville for class by 1:00, out by 3:00 and home by 4:00. Just a Thursday afternoon off. It felt so appealing, the thought of plunking down a few dollars, meeting some like-minded women, doing a bit of frivolous journaling.

That decision changed my life.