This summer my blog will turn 4 years old.  I have been writing with some degree of regularity on this thing for 4 years.  To me, that’s kind of a long time.  Still, I have had a mere 20,000 some odd visits.  Some sites get that in less than a minute.

The natural question is, why bother?

The answer:  I am a writer.   I love writing.  I love the permanence of it, I love how I can choose to remember things through writing.    I love that I can make mundane things funny or otherwise… I can sculpt an event by selecting what I write about.  Writing reflects what I truly value.  I love stories.  I am a hoarder of stories.

(sidenote, I heard a special about people who hoard this week.  What a terrible problem to have!  All that junk!  But then I thought about what I hoard.  Truly, I hate forgetting a good story.  I want to keep them all and tell them when I am old and I want them to be good enough to listen to.  I love my sister in law’s stories, she tells them the best, and they are so fun to listen to.   So, I would like to learn that too.  I hoard stories.)

I specifically blog because if I wrote my stuff just for me to read, it would be a mess.  When I write for whoever to read, I clean up my act a little.  I use my Strunk and White brain and I make my writing better.  I use conventions correctly (more or less), which I would never bother to do if I didn’t let it loose into the wild.

I am a big lover of the simple things in life.  The chimney swifts that are living in my chimney, tweeting up a storm.  A delightful meal.  The dumb hat I bought that made me insanely happy.  I like to remember them, they are like little free time capsules.

Sometimes when I read a book, I like to put down my thoughts about it.  There are some books that merit it.  What I wouldn’t give for a book club that went through some of the books coming out from Brian McLaren and his ilk, as well as some of the older foundational authors like Bonhoefer.  So I write my thoughts, more often so at Elisha’s Bones.   They are like mini book reports. I get all into things, Malcolm X, the Amish, obscure places of interest, small islands, all this time is spent just finding out more.  And I would forget it if I didn’t put it down somewhere.

Finally, I realize that I have just a precious few years to have S and A be these young little beautiful bringers of joy in my life.  I need a place to put a context around this time.

So now when I wonder why I bother, I will not have to be perplexed and try to figure it out.  Phew!  I can check that off the list of things to do.