My Absence Explained

As I log back into my Blogger account for the first time in a long while, I see that I only managed a single post last year. The publication date for the entry, February 19, 2023, explains everything about the lack of further blog productivity to me, though perhaps not to my readers. 

You see, while life was calm enough in the weeks leading up to that blog post, the weeks after were some of the roughest of my life to this point. Without getting into details, several days after publishing my last blog post, I temporarily relocated to my home state to be with family as my younger brother was admitted to hospice care. He was gone in a couple of weeks, and I stuck around a little longer to help with everything that comes along with the death of a family member. 

The year and months since then have, for sure, included many moments from mundane to momentous. In addition to work and everyday living, traditional family gatherings and yearly celebrations, and keeping up with the shitshow of current world events, my husband and I celebrated 5 years of marriage with a trip to Jamaica, traveled through Spain, and experienced the total solar eclipse in Texas (and enjoyed the blue bonnets that Lady Bird Johnson played such a part in preserving and popularizing). We lost my mother-in-law to ALS and a sister-in-law to divorce, welcomed three new cats into our home (technically adopted two in January 2023 and cat-sat another for a few months later in the year), got to meet a celebrity (for whom one of those cats is named), dealt with water in our basement on more than one occasion, and are still dealing with the aftermath of putting in a (hopefully) permanent water abatement system. Amidst all that grief, mourning, celebrating, travel planning, cat caring, and crisis response, let's just say there was little desire to spend my time reading and writing about First Ladies. 

I finally decided last month that it was time to get back into the project, and I finished a biography of First Lady Grant last week. I hope to complete a blog post about it in the next few days. I knew absolutely nothing about Mrs. Grant going in, and while I don't know if I learned all that much about her 300+ pages later, I gathered (and remember) enough to write up some thoughts. 

Until then happy Father's Day, and (at the risk of sounding overly sappy) if you have a brother, tell him you love him.