I love marmalade, and this tempting photo in the NYTimes attached to a recipe for marmalade, somehow put me in the mood to blog again. Actually, that is overstating the magical powers of the photo or the substance. For all of the time I have spent "away from here" as John B puts it, I have spent not an insubstantial amount of that time thinking that I should be writing here. So, yesterday, I was poking around, both here and at Blog Meridian, Willo's, and the Cassandra Pages, Steph's, etc. really emjoying everyone else's ongoing blog world as if visiting another time and place, almost another life. In that sense, Cassandra (Elizabeth)'s post of a photo from some years ago in Vermont was very apropos. How does a life, one's own continuous life, seem to suddenly ---though it isn't sudden--- become a life so different from the life and self that one once knew ? As readers of this blog (hearty souls, for certain !) will know, I had an abrupt and quite unwanted break in that continuity before I'd begun this blog, once so forceful that I experienced it as exile. This is a much more happy circumstance, but has brought with it stresses all its own: I've gone from being quite single and contentedly so, to falling in love with a man with whom, we two agree, we'd like to make a life together. Complications and adventure abound: it is long distance, children are in the picture, job stress (Greenhouse City has turned Dickensian, but I am hanging in) and potential relocation issues lo---, well, no, they don't loom as much as they open up so many possibilities and uncertainties. About which I'm most likely to write very little, details being what they are, and this blog being unknown to him. It's kind of my place, my diary in the sock drawer, so I've been wondering about that, too: the blogs I've mentioned are openly tied to their writers' identities. I know there are other bloggers out there that do what I do (academics are notorious for it, as are doctors and therapists, privacy issues being what they are, or, in the case of academics, academia being what it is): any thoughts on the "sock drawer blog," so to speak ?Ahem: back to my tale of getting back here. Either Willo really reads her sitemeter thoroughly or she mistook my last blog post for 2011 instead of 2010, but there it is, posted below, how nice to see me back. Yes, wouldn't it be, I thought. So here I am. I'll be coming around to visit you all more obviously. Thank you, Willo !
