The benefits of English Class!

I remember as a child, I wanted to be an English Teacher. As I grew older, my interst turned towards the Health Care field.
English was always my favorite subject all through my school years, even college. I have to say, the benefits I reaped from my English classes, espcially from my college English classes, most certainly helped me in writing my college term papers and my book.
I also believe that my experience with writing the many term papers in college was a great benefit to me, especially with doing the research for my book. I used the research skills, ( I did a LOT of research during my college years), to delve into life in Florida in the 1900,s. My main focus was to have an accurate description of what the homes were like, what kind of furniture was used, what it was made of. I also researched what a typical small town in Florida may have looked like in 1908. I wanted to have an insight to that time period so that my readers could visualize the characters' surroundings.
Now some of the surroundings, such as the olfactory, (smells), and taste of food described in my book, came from some foods I experienced when I was first married. My husband's grandmother and great aunt were a couple of very old fashion ladies and made everything homemade. They would grow and can their own vegetables, they made cakes and cookies from scratch. Those two old ladies could cook! Their mother, (my husband's great grandmother), was a young mother back in the early 1900's. She taught the two sisters how to cook and according to my husband's grandmother, her nor her sister ever strayed away from what they were taught as children. It was truely a blessing that they didn't! I looked forward to going to my husband's grandmother's for dinner. Her and sister's cooking could not be matched! They are gone now and I not only miss their cooking, but I miss them. They were two wonderful people. Other environmental surroundings described came from my reading experiences and movies I viewed thoughout various times in my life. I also used quite a bit of my imagination.
I came up with my characters from different people I met troughout my life. I thought about some of the physical and personality traits that interest me about some of these individuals and used them, although most of the make up of my characters were born out of pure imagination! I remember as a child, when I read a book, I would always place myself in the world of the characters I was reading about. As a child and even a teen, I never really thought about just how well written those books were. I just knew that I was enjoying them at the time I was reading them. As I grew older, I started to appreciate just how wonderful those Authors' were for their thoroughness and just how well written their work really was. You see, I never forgot those stories.