Dear Reader:

Maybe it was the photos from yesterday’s blog depicting St. Jude’s Chapel of Hope in Trust, North Carolina,  but suddenly last night I grabbed my “little c” scrapbook (dusted it off) and began going back through it again. Isn’t hindsight so much easier than the day- to-day struggles… wondering and praying about what the future will bring…or not.

I had only been “at it” (writing) the daily blog for a few months when I got a call from local reporter, Leslie Cantu (a doll baby) saying that a friend, Cindy Ashley, had told her that she might want to give me a call and find out more about a contest going on between me and Scheherazade. A new twist on an old story.

I got the call and told Leslie to come over if she liked and I would explain the contest to her. It was the “beginning of a great friendship.”

I have, also, heard from several of you who started reading the blog just a couple of years ago or even later….who were wondering about how it all got started too. Then while I was looking through the scrapbook Friday evening….I noticed that the ‘human interest’ story that Leslie published for the local Summerville paper was dated March 9, 2011.

It has been five years since I started the storytelling contest between myself and the fictitious Scheherazade.  Five years! At the time I thought it would be a miracle if I could just live long enough (1002 days and nights) to tell one more extra story than our famed Arabian storyteller to beat the record.

So starting today….for the next three days….we will go backwards to when and where it all began…  the history of this little blog…so the future will materialize more clearly based on everything leading up to it.

And oh how plans change. Here is the first blog written-August 7, 2010…..these were my goals and dreams….of which none turned out the way I thought.

Chapel of Hope Stories– First Day-the blog goes out (I was terrified)

*You might need to stop and put on your reading/magnifying glasses….I took photos of my printed copy and it is a little wavy….but hopefully you can get the gist of what that first blog looked like…

My proverb was right...”It (does) take a thousand voices to tell a single story.” And thanks to all of you the stories have kept coming. But, to my disappointment, I never got (but a small handful of) responses from visitors to St. Jude’s Chapel telling me what drew them there and perhaps what they left behind on the altar and why.

So the little chapel has been the impetus to my on-going blog and a whole new life but the on-going correspondence between people visiting the chapel and the blog has never materialized to the extent that I once hoped for…

Instead the blog tells stories of us mere mortals and our struggles to learn and grow each day. I think Beverly Barutio would approve of us using her chapel as a role model for our own spiritual strength along our journey…especially since this little chapel in the woods has provided refuge from wanderings for years. It sure provided one for me….but that’s another story for another day.

In this old newspaper article (dated five years ago) you can get a better understanding of all that  happened preceding the birth of the blog and the storytelling contest….plus it is much easier to read.

Becky Dingle tells stories. At Alston Middle School, she was the “teacher with 1,000 stories,” the one who taught social studies through tales of the past.

She’s also a cancer survivor, a recent addition to her life story.
And now she’s telling her stories to a greater public, as a blogger who writes one story a day, every day, until she reaches her goal of 1,002 stories – one story more than the fabled Scheherazade told to save her life.

Telling stories may or may not stave off cancer the way Scheherazade’s stories stalled the king’s plans to behead her, but if Dingle reaches her 1,002nd tale, it will be on the fifth anniversary of her cancer surgery, a remarkable aligning of the stars that Dingle takes as a sign.

“It’s been a life-altering experience, starting this blog,” she said.
Like so many life-altering events, Dingle didn’t exactly start out with a plan to write a story a day.

She discovered she had breast cancer in May 2008, shortly after her daughter’s wedding. Friends and family were noticing how much weight she seemed to have lost, and she at first brushed them off with exclamations of how fortuitous it was to lose weight right before the wedding.

Eventually they pushed her to see a doctor. Two days after her doctor’s appointment, she was in surgery. The prognosis was not good…it appeared to be a type of cancer that is treatable to some extent but not normally curable It has a tendency to keep returning.

Dingle felt like she needed to do something.  She just wasn’t sure what that something was.
Then her friend Honey Burrell took her to the Chapel of Hope in Trust, N.C.

The chapel was built by cancer survivor Beverly Barutio in the small community of Trust, about 30 miles northwest of Asheville. It’s a small, almost dollhouse-like structure, Dingle said, but exquisitely beautiful and filled with Beverly’s spirit.

Visitors have left totems – a baseball, letters, photos, a baby’s pacifier – with meaning known only to them. Dingle was curious about the stories behind these items, but she didn’t act on that curiosity at first. Then, her daughter suggested that the stories at the chapel were collectively what she had been searching to tell.
That’s when Dingle started writing about her experiences at the chapel and collecting stories of others’ experiences.

Initially, she intended the blog merely to share stories of the Chapel of Hope. She left note cards at the chapel asking visitors to reply with their tales of what brought them there.
Replies started off slowly, so Dingle began writing  her own stories to fill space. (The stories might be triggered by something she overheard at the store or a comment made by a friend at lunch…) .
“I kept thinking I was just filling in until people started writing back,” she said.

Then she ran into an old acquaintance who said she’d been reading the blog and noted that Dingle had “always been the teacher with 1,000 stories.”

Something clicked.

Dingle decided she would write 1,002 stories to beat Scheherazade’s 1001 Arabian Nights’ Tales.. It was Aug. 31, so she went to an online calculator to figure out what the date would be after 1,002 days and the answer leapt out at her. May 29, 2013. Exactly (to the day) five years after the initial surgery and prognosis.

What’s most surprising to those who learn of her goal is that she doesn’t worry about what she’ll write each day. She doesn’t feel pressure to meet a deadline, she said.
Instead, she wakes up each day filled with excitement and joy… wondering what she’ll discover to write about.

Dingle said joy is the most pervasive new feature of her life post-surgery. She just doesn’t have time to deal with negative people in her life anymore, she said.

She herself feels like all her perceptions are heightened.
“I’ve always been a happy person, but not this depth of happiness,” nothing like what she experiences now.
She also sees new depth in the stories she tells. Now she sees the morality/spirituality in tales she once told her students purely for historical lessons.

Dingle said she doesn’t dwell on why she got cancer. She thinks the younger patients, those who are working and have young children, are far worse off than she. Her heart breaks for them.
She’s thankful for her supportive family and friends and that she has the opportunity to work with schools on special projects even in retirement.

She’s looking forward to the spring, hopeful that as the weather warms more people will visit the Chapel of Hope and send their stories to her. In the meantime, she’s got plenty of tales to tell. Visit her blog at chapelofhopestories.com.

……………………………………….

So until tomorrow….”Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.”

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

• Even though I have been going down memory lane….the present persistently pulls me back. When I first started the blog I had one grandchild….Eva Cate and today I have four grandchildren. Isn’t that a miracle….how can people not believe in miracles?
• Eva Cate had a girl’s day out with mommy Friday. She got to tour her school for next year as a big first grader (can she really be starting first grade?) at James B. Edwards. Mandy said she was most excited about all the playground equipment going in for next year. (That’s our girl) Later John and Mandy took her to the movies….a great way to end her spring break.
• And then there’s our little lucky leprechaun, Lachlan, who turns one on St. Patrick’s Day. Boy…does that bring back memories from last year! Mollie got some pictures of the birthday boy at Sullivans Island.
• Mollie said that Lachlan is the cuddly one and Rutledge the “ham”….it takes all kinds to make up this old world!
• 

Anne took her nephew, Andy, and his girlfriend, Kaitlyn, to Dukes in Ridgeville to show them some real southern cooking. She brought me back a plate and everyone stayed for a few “libations” and sweets.

It was such a beautiful night…no mosquitoes, or gnats swarming…just cool breezes out on the deck as a South Carolina crescent moon welcome these two University of Maine students to the state on their spring break.

I gave Andy and Kaitlyn a lantern and told them they had to enter the magic moon gate through the circle, then follow the garden path to the fountain and each throw a penny in for good fortune. They were quite successful……