I have not made a post in over six months. I'm not sure how that happened, but after doing some catch up reading, on some favorite blogs and some others new to me, I have a renewed determination to revive this one.
I know one cause for the writing gap is that I got caught up in our new life. Mom had surgery for carpal tunnel in March. She is very independent, especially for someone who is 87, but until her hand healed enough, she needed much more assistance with personal things than usual. This was a strange reversal of roles. Every morning for many years when I was a child, she brushed my hair and put it in a ponytail. Here I was, doing the same for her. An inside-out deja vu.
Another factor was, once the snow melted, the farm work commenced. Even thought we no longer have farm animals or field work, there is still much to be done, inside and out. Minnesota has such a short fair-weather season, we have to scurry to achieve all the outdoor projects on our list. I had forgotten how physical effort can burn up your day, and leave you crashed in the recliner with no energy left for intellectual pursuits.
I have to admit, another reason I put off writing here is that I did not want my blog to become too maudlin, or worse, one big long whine. Too many of my posts were about sad things, it seemed to me, and our summer has been filled with more sadness. I wrote about the pain of losing a pet. Since I wrote that post we have lost three more cats, including my beloved Norm, the inside cat, which broke my heart into a million more pieces. Last October we had seven cats, one indoors and six outdoors, and now we are down to one. I might still write more about them, especially Norm. He was such a remarkable creature, his story should be recorded somehow. I will postpone that project until it is balanced with more positive writings, and also until the pain of his loss has healed enough that I can write about him without the tears starting again.
So, I'm back. I look forward to finding time to get back to my blogging friends, whom I was just getting to know, and making new ones.
I grew up on a farm in west central Minnesota, a mile from the nearest town of 300 people. We visited my mother's sister in Minneapolis often and, in my mind, urban life made my rural existence pale by comparison. I could hardly wait to graduate and leave small town life behind.
Fast forward thirty-five years. College, office jobs, marriage, the usual; except no children (by chance, not by choice). My husband's job layoff and subsequent heart attack turned our lives upside down. We found, without his income, we could no longer afford our city lifestyle. At the same time my mother, now 86, still lived on the family farm but had reached a point where she could no longer live there alone. We solved both problems by moving back home in December of 2006.
I envision this blog as a chronicle of our adaptation to rural life, as well as a home for my thoughts, opinions, memoirs, and maybe even recipes.
~January 15, 2007
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Picking up where I left off
Posted by Barb T. at 10:10 AM 5 comments
Labels: Farm Life
