I’ve had an on-again, off-again affair with blogging for years. Today I decided to delete thousands of spam messages and start fresh.

Yes, my last post said I was starting fresh.

And then my mother died.

My biological family went from 4 generations to 2 in just 10 months. Some days we are okay. Other days we are not.

To say I’m a completely different writer/woman/family member/friend now than I was when the most recent dozen posts were written is overly dramatic and untrue. Much of me is still the same.

But I’ve jettisoned so much, out of necessity, and it has been scattered so far from me over the course of time, I’m struggling to decide which pieces to pick up again.

I wrote on a private blog for a bit while taking care of Granny just for myself. . . until I didn’t want to process anything, I just wanted it to be over. Then before I had fully recovered from that season of life, Mom got sick, the pandemic hit, and she died.

Like most people, this year has felt eternal. It has had high points (a trip in late January to Disneyland to celebrate my nephew Noah’s graduation, long before travel restrictions). I have been blessed with 3-4 more grandchildren since some of the recent blog posts were written, depending on the timing.

I want to get back to sharing books I’ve enjoyed. To sharing quotes, thoughts, and poems. If only to remind myself to pause and leave myself a bread crumb trail of the marvels in my life, small and large, that make it meaningful.

Here’s to putting one foot in front of the other, and as my daddy would say, “Keeping it between the ditches.”