Desert Year, the blog I started a few months after my son died.
Search the Sea, my longtime blog.
I started blogging back at the end of March, 2004, on the old AOL Journal pages. That blog, Midlife Matters, lasted until early 2006 when, along with many others, I departed AOL in the wake of its decision to impose advertising on its blog pages. Too bad, really; we had a nice little community of writers there for awhile. Some of the links you see on this blog are to friends from those days, still writing strong.
I continued writing, moving over to Blogger with Search the Sea in November 2005. (My AOL screenname was oceanmrc; on Blogger, I got started under the nom-de-plume Gannet Girl. Notice a trend?)
It's a bit jarring to read my writing from those early years. We were SO happy as a family. A few months after our son Josh died by suicide on September 2, 2008, I sensed that Search the Sea was about to sink under the weight of the grief that had overwhelmed me, and so I started taking most of that to a new blog, Desert Year. I posted entries to both blogs during 2009, and have added a few more entries to Desert Year over the past few months.
Meanwhile, Search the Sea ran aground in March 2010, when I opened this much less anonymous blog.
To be continued . . . just beginning to figure out this "extra pages" thing.
