Two or three long winded posts this June. Almost Nuthin! Still an increase in visitors. The first three months of this year had an average of a little over 1,200 visitors back when I was actually writing on a daily basis. Then I stop writing regularly in April and get 4000 visitors followed by 5,000 in May. June saw over 6,000 visitors! I’m almost afraid to resume writing lest I drive the visitor numbers down……which reminds me of a joke:
I regularly beat my head against a brick wall. When someone asks me why I do it I explain that it feels so good when I stop.
I used to collect butterflies. My Mom helped me mount a dozen of them in a deep picture frame when I was in high school but in a few years a bug that eats dead things got in and all the wings fell off as it consumed the desiccated bodies. Now there was some damned point I was going to make…..what was it? Ah Metamorphosis……and not the Kafka kind.
I’ve always liked the metaphor for a butterfly caterpillar transforming itself into a pupa and then emerging as a butterfly. Over the years I’ve found a few and brought them home to open in our house. I’ve been stewing a lot for the last three months of relative writing inactivity. I stew less when I let my fingers fly to input blog posts. Well, I’ve done a fair amount of reading in that time as I mentions in my threadbare if ponderous June posts.
I think silence and meditation are a good way to purge oneself of too much verbiage at least until you want to take a dive back into verbosity. I did finish Twain’s Life on the Mississippi so that entry in my books page is now accurate. I got 300 pages into “The Warmth of other Suns” before I had to turn my attention to the repair and maintenance of two houses prior to our leaving on a short family vacation. I finished priming a picket fence yesterday and planting strawberries in my garden. Now I’m ready to depart with my daughter and the grandsons. Off too North Dakota.
I’ll set the marvelous Warmth aside until I return. I’m too far into it to start reading it out loud to my daughter as I have been to Claudia. It should pick up nicely when we get home again. The trip we take to the Black Hills will be very much a second decade of the new century trip with our two little boys hooked up with devices to watch movies and play games while we cross the prairies on the Interstate.
We’ve got lots of things to do in the Black Hills to make them put their gadgets away but that doesn’t mean the adults won’t want to keep their attention off the long drive. I just looked for some possible books to read along our Journey. The first that came to mind was Blue Highways. I remember reading glowing reviews of the book but was more than astonished to learn that had been 30 years ago. One of the Reviewers at the Great Reads website mentioned that it reminded her of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. That’s 30 years older yet. It was written in about 1963 or two years before my Dad began taking his family on marathon trips across the U.S. and Canada “to get his kids to all 50 states”. (He nearly did it but I had to get to Hawaii on my own. That was a great trip from which we returned with a little bonus who will be starting his PhD program in a month’s tiime down in St. Louis.)
The two travelogues encompass far more than the Dakota territory and I’ve also suggested “Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. My wife’s family lived and farmed in South Dakota a few decades after “Little House” and my Mother’s father grew up on a farm in dusty central Kansas at about the same time as the book. I’ve never read Wilder’s books. They are probably too old for our grandsons aged 3 and 5 but not for me.
I’m waiting for my wife and daughter to weigh in before choosing.
I’m not expecting to document my travels on the blog. Haven’t done that since going to Denmark in 2006. Maybe I’ll post a couple of pictures if I take the computer. Too big a hassle on the Samsung phone.
