An Apple A Day and Wild Flowers Pretty Things

An Apple A Day and Wild Flowers Pretty Things are two of my all-time favorite blogs. I’ve been following them for the longest time and I can remember, give-or-take a day, exactly when I first began reading them.

It was new year 2010 and we were snowed into the house. We’d had a number of visitors staying over the holidays. A little nephew had flown over from Munich on Christmas Eve, feeling all grown up because it was the first time by himself. His parents wanted to help improve his English and had given strict instructions not to speak any other language at the tea table. One of A’s sisters ‘S’ was staying, and H and her boyfriend were home for the holidays. So the house was a bit busier than usual with more friends and family members visiting. All going to see Avator at the cinema, playing board games and tenpin bowling, and making, and eating, lovely family meals with all seven or eight chairs actually getting used at the big old school table.

Then S left to spend New Year with her boyfriend, we drove nephew back to the airport in London and dropped H off at her student house. Other visitors gradually wended their weary way home. Suddenly the house seemed really empty.

It was the middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep and I was missing everybody, especially H. I didn’t want to wake A, he was fast asleep so I did my usual sneaking-downstairs-blanket-in-hand to snuggle up on the sofa with a mug of something hot - thing. This time to do a little blog reading...my old laptop was still working then.

That was when I discovered the blogs. I was in my element when I found that An Apple A Day was written by Amy Emerson Merrick who also edits and writes for Design Sponge. Her family home was just like something out of Little Women. I wondered if she was related to Ralph Waldo Emerson so there would actually be a Louisa May Alcott connection, however tenuous. I loved reading about her family, her apartment in Brooklyn, how she almost burned down the family home Elmwood, whilst housesitting. Read of her visits to parents' and grandparents' amazing homes in New Hampshire.

And the photographs...they were amazing. Beautiful ones of lacy dresses hanging in windows backlit by rays of sunshine, bunches of ranunculus plopped into vases, vintage items rescued from pavements or bought from interesting looking antique stores, and like me she loved bugs too! She seemed a bit of a tomboy and reminded me of my childhood fictional heroine Josephine March.

Then there was red headed Anna Allen author of Wild Flowers Pretty things a bit of an amateur dramatics enthusiast and star of the above film. Again a house in a lovely wilderness, this time Iowa…and a penchant for baking nice things, knitting woolly socks and making cotton dresses that Laura Ingalls Wilder would be proud of...yet another child hood throwback, this time to my Little House on the Prairie reading days.

I wonder if you remember when you began reading some of your favourite blogs...