I looked with shock at my last post, as I realized it was from last spring.
Son noted in said post has just passed thru the living room saying he only reads my blog to see if he's mentioned. Guess what, Mack?
He is now a senior; our last offspring will be graduating this year and heading off to some unknown institution of advanced learning. The final 4 years of 6 kids educated thru college.
You know we just had our 26th first day of school? Scary.
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I had an intriguing experience last night and this morning. I came across a blog written by a high school classmate of mine. Like most of us, he blogs about things he's interested in. One of them is history, including his personal history and the years spent growing up in our hometown. I scanned his blog, choosing to read a handful of entries he'd written, anything with the old town's name in it. I finally had to write him a note, praising one entry especially, the post he'd written about the sounds of the village. It evoked such a response, bringing me right back to the time we lived there and the people we knew. What got to me the most, and I should have told him, was that he wrote about the very sort of things I think about when I think of that time. From his perspective, of course, but the same people and places and events. Maybe it should be noted that our graduating class had only 86 students, and it was a centralized school district populated by farms and a village with one stoplight and 4 churches. Still, the feeling was a bit uncanny.
He replied to my comment, glad to have heard from me, but saying I was a real writer and he was not. I will tell him that to me a real writer is someone who writes from the heart. Now, a published writer is maybe something else again, but there are published writers I would say are not real writers. He is.
Besides being a humbling compliment, the whole thing has inspired me to return to my blogs. I need to be a real writer on-line again. So I will be back soon, with updates on Blackwater and our family, and life. It's going to be good.