The concept of quitting has been much on my mind lately. Well, not quitting per se, where one makes a conscious choice to stop doing something but rather I've been thinking of a more passive variety, the kind where after a (possibly long) while one sits up, looks around and says, "Hey, remember that thing we used to do? How come we don't do that anymore? What happened?" But there's no clear break, no before and after.

Along those lines, lately I've kind of been wondering about this blog. I've not been able to remember why I started writing - other than the whole canning thing - but carried on out of inertia and a feeling like this little collection of bytes has seen me through quite a lot and some loyalty was in order. I mean, from the first post until now I've moved house twice, given birth, planned parties, taken trips, read books and had all manner of kitchen adventures. Inasmuch as a blog is a diary, this is the closest I've ever come to the latter.

While pondering whether or not to continue, I embarked on a house cleaning and decluttering spree. The lengths to which I need to go with said cleaning are a bit embarassing for a family that hasn't lived in this house two years yet especially a family led by two adults who love to believe that they don't buy much. Ahem. As part of this cleaning I've discovered all sorts of interesting things - copies of apparently unread cooking magazines shoved into the cookbook shelf, a barely begun needlepoint chair cover, plans for a wedding cake I intended to make just to see if I could do it, documentation of plans to organize a reunion of the descendants of one of my great-great-great-grandfathers and more. In other words, evidence of things I used to enjoy doing and writing about but about which I'd completely forgotten.

How could I have forgotten? I sat down to read the Gourmet magazine I'd found and vaguely remember once having had a subscription to that and two or three of its competitors, and how on the day they'd arrive I'd declare a household day of recipe experimentation and plan out the next month's new meals to try. How could I have forgotten? Somewhere along the line, I'd simply quit reading cooking magazines, despite my profound enjoyment of the genre. I don't recall deciding to stop, I just did. I realize that I have been missing this sense of culinary adventure and the sheer joy of receiving such pure fun in the mail. I didn't know I'd been missing these things, but it's clear to me now that I was, profoundly.

Likewise with the needlepoint. I remember fondly my paternal grandmother's needlepoint chair pads and recall with sadness that when she died I was not in a position to ask to have the chairs (or even just the covers) shipped to me "back East" with the result that the chairs were donated to some or other worthy organization and lost to the family forever. But I took great pleasure in planning out covers of my own depicting my favorite flowers (hydrangea, lillies, lilacs), purchasing supplies and, like a medieval chatelaine working on her tapestries, embarking on what I saw to be a multi-year project. And then? Nothing. It appears that I quit that, too, without really having decided to.

It occurs to me that it wasn't so much the blog that troubled me as that I couldn't imagine what on earth I used to put in it. Finding these fairly recent artifacts of my abandoned creative life along with a short survey of my archives revealed to me that I couldn't think of anything to write about because I'd ceased altogether doing the kinds of things that caused me to start writing in the first place. A year or so ago I thought that the slowdown in canning had been the problem. Turns out I wasn't looking in the right place. It was my own unconscious turning away from, quitting if you will, my own creativity in favor of a severe practicality that emphasized only what I could define as useful, dictated by forces external to my family and home. Thank goodness I've realized what I'd done before I'd practical'ed myself into a serious depression.

Coming up? Less practical, more delightful.