Pollyanna Reborn

Hello again. It’s Pollyanna. I haven’t written a blog post in six years! A couple of things happened that caused me to lose my voice. That’s a story for another post. However, this year, 2022, has been so weird and bad and unstable that I found my voice coming back. How crazy is that?

It occurred to me in resurrecting Pollyanna that I never told the story of how she came to be. That might be a good place to start over.

The story kind of starts out like a fairy tale. Once upon a time there was a beautiful, dark-haired princess. This princess had an equally beautiful sister who was sixteen years older than she was. This big sister was like a second mother to the little girl and the little girl adored her. When the big sister was twenty-two years old she got married. Soon thereafter the big sister had a baby (me) and apparently I “stole” the princess crown. So my aunt, who I adore and always have, lived the rest of her childhood in the limelight of this annoying little brat that she did not like very much. Ironically, my aunt is only six years older than me and very much like my own big sister. She is smart and loving and I believe loves me a lot more than she did when I was a kid. I’m crazy about her and so glad that I have her in my life.

Every year for Christmas my poor aunt got dragged to Florida with my grandparents to spend this holiday (and every holiday) with her sisters family – her two annoying nieces and her princely nephew. I don’t know what I did, truly I don’t, but one Christmas I must have really gotten on her nerves. I was probably about ten years old so my aunt would have been sixteen. Too cool for school for sure and definitely not wanting to spend her time with a ten year old on Christmas break. Whatever I did caused my aunt to look at me and say “Oh, you are such a little Pollyanna!” I did not know what that meant but the way she said it made me think that it was something really terrible, hateful and bad.

So as I always did in these situations, I headed to the library to find out who this horrible “Pollyanna” type person was. This was long before the Internet so I had to rely on the best source of information ever, the friendly librarian, and the old-fashioned card catalog. I found it! I read it from cover to cover. In one pathetic day! Hey, what’s wrong with being a Pollyanna? She’s kind. She’s happy all the time. She makes people feel good. I was kind of mad but I wasn’t stupid enough to challenge a teenage girl who was bigger than me.

Fast forward about forty years… I was visiting my aunt and enjoying a really good conversation. I told her that I was thinking of starting a blog. I needed a creative outlet for all the thoughts swirling around in my head. Without hesitation, my brilliant and witty aunt said “You should call yourself Pollyanna in Savannah!” The rest as they say is “history”.