What’s with the Mark Twain quotes?

I know you’ve noticed.  If you know me well, you know why I almost always have a Mark Twain quote at the end of a post.  The rest of you either tolerate it, or question “What’s with the Mark Twain quotes?”   So if you’ll  indulge me for a moment and let me write about something that doesn’t have anything to do with ADHD……well,  you might say that Tom Sawyer probably had it,,,,,but anyways this post doesn’t.  

I like Twain. No, that’s not correct. I really, really like Mark Twain. Actually, I love Mark Twain. And my love affair with him began when I was in high school.

A little personal history. When I was in high school, my family had friends who moved to Sonora, California. Sonora, is located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where the Gold Rush of 1849 took hold. Sonora and the surrounding area is known as the Mother Lode. and is still called that today. My parents and I visited our friends and explored the surrounding area, which included visiting Angels Camp, a small gold rush town in Calaveras county, and the cabin where Mark Twain stayed in while he was visiting and trying his hand at mining. (He didn’t do so well) He wrote and published his first story based on a story he heard at a hotel in Angels Camp – “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” This information just all grabbed my interest and I started reading everything I could get my hands on about Mark Twain. I obviously knew about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but I became a bit intrigued and obsessed about Mark Twain’s time in California.

Skip to college. By this time I had read a big chunk of Mark Twain’s books. But I still really had a thing for his California days, being the California girl that I am. This came in handy as I wrote an English term paper specifically on Twain’s time in California. And no, I don’t have that paper anymore. I wish I did.

My parents ended up moving to Sonora which became a second home for me. And wouldn’t you know it, that when I started dating my husband, I discovered that he too loved Mark Twain. Fast forward twenty plus years, and my mother moved away from Sonora to live closer to family. But my husband and I continued to visit friends who had a cabin in a mountain town up Sonora Pass named – wait for it……Twain Harte!. Named after of course Mark Twain and Bret Harte (another author who wrote stories about the Gold Rush and Mother Lode area). After years of visiting and having a dream of owning a cabin there, we bought our small cabin in 2019..

All of this I have shared with you without telling you actually why Mark Twain has a hold on me. I admire and love his satire and humor. I would call him the greatest American humorist and satirist. He has seen and told things as they were in the late 1800’s and those things still apply today. There’s humor, and honesty and good advice in his writings. All things that I admire and try to emulate in my life. I can read a quote and giggle or laugh or nod or say – ‘yep, that’s a good one!” And I want to share my world of Mark Twain with you, the reader. And I try to connect a quote to what I write about in that blog. It doesn’t always work, but I do my best.

On a side note. Every year at the Calaveras County Fair and Jumping Frog Jubilee, there is a jumping frog contest. Anyone with a frog can enter. It’s quite hysterical to watch….

“I never count any prospective chickens when I know that Providence knows where the nest is.” – Mark Twain 1883 letter