Where has the time gone? I recently realized I’ve been neglecting Life in the Fast Lane.

I knew it had been a while; I just didn’t expect to find I hadn’t posted since January 20th 2017. An entire year has passed, plus change.

Sure, I could make excuses: Life got in the way. Deadlines needed to be met. Work demanded more attention. And they were all true — to a point.

Then there were the rabbit holes and procrastinating. I’ve been spending more time outside with my camera, photographing birds and other wildlife. I also made two fairly major trips last year, to Monticello in Virginia in May, and to the Northern Tier of Pennsylvania in August.

One trip was in celebration of 22 years of the best decision I ever made, asking Jessie to marry me. The other was for my middle son’s 19th birthday, hiking State Parks and photographing a solar eclipse, or at least as much of the eclipse as we could reach (about 60 percent occlusion).

Which brings me to procrastination. Just those two trips alone should have provided more than enough material for several blog posts; but the words wouldn’t come. How could I describe a glimpse of a black bear in the rear view mirror as Jessie and I drove the Skyline Drive? Or a night at Cherry Spring Park, neck straining and jaw slack from the spectacle of millions of sparkling diamonds spilling across an endless cushion of black velvet sky? My inner critic assured me there was no way I could put these moments into words anyone would want to read.

There were more mundane moments, too, like painting the master bedroom to surprise Jessie when she returned home from three weeks singing for the Little Sisters of the Poor in Ireland and Scotland, a job we’d been putting off for 15 years at least. Or the back — and heart — breaking job of deciding which three gooseberries would stay when I tore out “Gooseberry Row,” a thorny, tangled scrub of 14 varieties.

Would anyone really care about backyard barbecues? Were countless photos of herons, geese, eagles and ducks worth sharing on Life in the Fast Lane? Was there anything noteworthy of a late, slow and dismal Fall devoid of color? Maybe, but I was too self-conscious to try sharing.

That needs to change. Now. I promise to start sharing more of this so-called Life in the Fast Lane. If you like what you read, drop me a line asking for more. Even better, share my posts with friends. And if you don’t, if you find my ramblings unimportant, please drop me a note telling me why. I write for myself, it’s true. But more importantly, I write for you. If stories are written, never to be read, then what are they, but ugly black scratches defiling a perfectly good sheet of paper.

Tell me: Do you want to know where the time went?

Published on May 3, 2018

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