~=Deceptive Perception=~

If you are thinking you see melting snow, you are wrong.  Not wrong in the context of reality; just wrong because I say so.  What I am showing you here is the froth on the surf as it sweeps across the gravel drive, stopping just short of my pasture.

You see?  The surf is pulling back now, leaving little lines of briny bubbles.  Dig fast into that gravel and you’ll come up with sand crabs.  Maybe a whole palm full of them.  They tickle your palms as they scramble to fling themselves back down onto the liquid sand.

The water always reaches with such uneven fingers.  And this looks like beach at dawn or beach at twilight.  But that’s okay, because it’s so dark you can’t really tell this isn’t really sand, but winter-dormant grass and the horse manure berm I build along the edge of the pasture to keep the irrigation water on the grass.

I found all this because I look down after I clamber over the fence and trudge down the long drive.  I realized that I could be walking the edge of the surf – if only I didn’t look up and see the endless gray, and the fences and the ring of mountains that would never let the ocean get quite this far.  And besides.  I must have wanted the beach pretty badly, somewhere in the back of my mind.

End of Part One.

Interlude:

Here we are on the back deck of the house, barking at anything that is moving on the other side of the river.  We do better if we set a look-out to cue the barking for those of us on ground level.

End Interlude

Part Two: What do you expect?

So, there’s a girl who’s fairly local but who does a fairly famous blog called cjane. (Am I allowed to italic a blog title?)  Like the rest of you guys, I’m not a real blog-surf kind of person.  Mostly, I read my family (which does include Ginger and Rachel and would include Geneva, if she bothered to write anything, which she never will), and some darling good friends (who might as well be family), and a couple of crafty contacts I admire.  That alone is enough to swallow up any novel writing time (or cleaning time) I might have put aside in a day.  But a ton people read the afore mentioned fairly famous blog.  And as the author of it was doing doing a series in response to something she overheard between two BYU co-eds one day (“This place is soooooo boring.  I mean, does anybody actually live here?”  Meaning.  Anyone interesting), a couple of boring famous people who actually do live here had been highlighted on the blog over the last many weeks.  Then Gin decided that just normal people should get a shot, and suggested us – which puts a kind of irresponsible, devil-may-care spin on the term “normal,” and voila – we were made interesting by association.

I didn’t know any of this was going on.  I just got up one morning, sat down hopefully with my computer – thinking maybe one or two of the thirty or so lovely and loving friends who read this stuff might have checked in overnight.

Yeah.

I’d had four hundred and ninety five hits, and it was only eight in the morning.  That thing about beating out my genealogy site?  It was a wipe-out.  I kept turning the pages back and forth (read: clicking all over the place), thinking something on the server must have gotten messed up.  But no.  These were all hits on me.  And all coming, I finally realized, through this one site.  Then Gin called and told me what was going on.  For the rest of the day, I could hardly leave the computer – watching these hits roll in from every country on the planet.  In the end, probably 1400 hits over a couple of days (I know, PW would simple brush crumbs off her lap).

And I sat there wondering, who are these people??? Then, inevitably, since I AM a writer by profession—do they like reading this? Then I found myself smack in the middle of Blogger Élan – Will they come back?  Will my “readership” expand?  Can I show off in front of HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE instead of tens?  And what if they HATE it?

By the end of the day, I had come to terms with that bit.  I hoped that if there were any among them who were kindred spirits, who might enjoy or benefit in any way from this kind of strange, faceless, long-distance friendship, that they would, indeed, come back when they liked.  BUT THEY DIDN’T HAVE TO.  Because I just write myself, mostly just to keep in contact with people I love or who, however inadvisably, love me, too.  And to make Dick Beeson laugh.  And to get Gordon to say, “Nice photographs.”

Still.

Still – somewhere not too far under the surface, there was one shining, brilliant treat I expected to get out of all this:

COMMENTS.

And I did.  And this is the punchline of Part Two:

Two.

I got two comments.

Out of all those countries and all those hits.  Two lovely women wrote and comforted me—the kindness of strangers.  Who were not strangers, because they knew dogs and understood that pain.  And I wished I could invite them and everyone else who had been so kind about Skye over for lunch.  Which I would have bought for everyone at Subway and brought home so we could sit around the living room and talk about stuff.

So here is a word to the wise: if you write a journal like this one, hoping to keep in contact with loved ones, feeling sad because it seems like only two people read you after all your hours of creating the offering – know two things: A) You never know how many people are reading without sending you back any echos.  And B) Two comments is (are?)  a lot, when they are meaningful.

For those who read: I know it’s been said a million times, but people who write would give their eye teeth just for a simple, kind greeting comment—if not for a fun, short conversation, or an expression of agreement, or a counter-opinion that can lead to more thinking.

It takes a lot out of a person to put herself out there with opinion, or a discussion of life and its vagaries.  It’s heart-breaking to work hard to make beautiful images – either in words or in photographs – and have nothing but silence greet them.  Like putting out your hand in offering to someone else and having them just stare down at the hand and never move to re-assure.

A novelist gets used to this to some degree: The Alien sold over 120 thousand copies, which means that probably five to eight times that many people have read it.  But I never know they’ve read it.  No bells ring in the house every time an angel gets his wings.  So novelists live for great reviews or letters from readers or awards or even royalties (which are really the least of those reassurances) – or ANYTHING to tell them that they really are alive and not invisible.  And that they’ve been understood.  That they’ve made somebody laugh or nod in sympathy – or that they’ve helped somebody reach some epiphany in their lives.

We are like bats: they can’t tell where they are without echos.  If you are blessed not to live by echos, you are one lucky dude.

But silence simply breaks the heart.  Just wrenches it.

And I am not going to put part three now because this is too flipping long.