When I launched this site a decade ago (!), I expected to share a few posts about the exhausting, cathartic, sometimes funny and strangely exhilarating process of cleaning out my parents’ attic. One damp box of mid-20th century toothpicks led to another, and thanks to support and input from readers like you, I learned that sharing family stories not only kept my late parents alive, it sustained me through the joys and sorrows of the years that followed.

In that spirit, and because honestly, how much more can be said about faded photographs and mildewed button boxes, I’ve decided to creak shut the attic door and launch a new site. It’s called “Why the World Wags,” and in it, I plan to wax on about well, whatever grabs me as I move along through life. Ten years on (!!!) from that first post here in “My Mothers’ Attic,” I find myself teetering at the edge of what some call the golden years. Has there ever been a more obvious euphemism? Golden in the sense of being burnished by life perhaps, but there are days when the world around me seems cast in the gray light of dusk. And yet! At other times, that world seems to sparkle in a way I rarely noticed when I was younger–when a bluebird lights on a leafy branch in our back garden, his feathers aglow with morning light, or when I’m able to revisit a place I’ve come to love, like the brilliant waters off the coast of Belize pictured above, or when my toddler granddaughter reaches for me, smiling, and calls my name (which at her bidding, seems to be “Gaga”).

Golden moments, every one.

If you’d like to join me on my continued journey, here is the first newsletter/post from the new site. I’ll be migrating some of my more popular posts from here to there, usually with some editing, but I’ll leave the Attic open a good while, too. To visit the new site itself, just click below. If you like what you read, consider subscribing (s’il vous plaît!)!

https://marthamattinglypayne.substack.com/

Thanks for reading, always, and I hope to see you in Why the World Wags!