Last Sunday afternoon, as the light outside faded early, I opened up a fat, blue notebook and sorted through recipes that I have been collecting there for many years. Many of the recipes had been properly put between clear plastic pages. Many others, however, were hastily stuffed in the notebook, falling out every time I opened it.

So, it was time to organize.

The process slowed the minute I came upon a handwritten recipe, on the back of a light-blue envelope, for Creamy Chicken Soup. This recipe came from one of my favorite places to eat lunch in Hartwell — the linoleum-topped counter at the back of Economy Drug Store, which closed years ago. Every weekday during the fall and winter, two sisters served up a homemade soup and sandwich. One of my favorite soups was the Creamy Chicken Soup. Still is.

Then I came upon a recipe for “Shrimp, Oyster, Crab Cocktail Sauce.” It is handwritten on a small piece of white paper, and at the bottom of that paper, it is signed, “V.S.T.” Virginia Salley Tavel was my great aunt. She lived on Edisto Island, and I adored her. Salt water ran through Aunt Virginia’s veins like blood does mine.

Every summer when I was a child, we would visit Aunt Virginia at her beach house, called “d’Salt.” I would carry my small suitcase and clamber up a narrow staircase that led to an attic room where all the children slept. A collection of old, lumpy beds ran the length of the long room.

At night, before we bedded down in the attic, we sat on Aunt Virginia’s back porch, facing the great Atlantic Ocean, and we watched for shooting stars. Aunt Virginia always had a cold beer in her hand, and sometimes she had a sip for me.

So it is that some of the recipes in my blue notebook are cut from magazines and newspapers. But many others are the sentimental type. Their ingredients are not just spices and staples, but the stuff of life, of people and places I have loved.

That said, while I was organizing my notebook, it occurred to me that perhaps I should make a special cookbook for my daughter, who is now living on her own, and that I should include these recipes and the memories they evoke.

Furthermore, I wondered if any of you who are reading this column have similar recipes? Recipes that are not only tasty and simple — for a busy young woman’s sake — but recipes whose ingredients are the stuff of life. Your life. The people and places you have loved.

If I receive enough such recipes, I will create a cookbook collection, which I will share with each of you.

You may e-mail me your recipe, and its accompanying story, at salley@hartcom.net. Or you may send what you have though the mail to Salley McInerney, 460 Woodhurst Drive, Hartwell, GA 30643.

I would love to hear from you. I really, really would.