People often use this time of year to reflect. To think about where they were in life a year ago. Before the new year begins.

To look at the calendar they’re about to take down, turning it back to January.

A lot can happen in 12 months time. Things you can’t foresee.

I had just moved here after a divorce. The divorce attorney told me that with the court’s mandate, I would financially be okay, have a chance to get on my feet, for four years. That, unfortunately, lasted only four months.

I moved here, where there was family. If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have gone in another direction. But hindsight is, as always, 20/20.

I broke my ankle on both sides in early July. That’s when things came to a head, so to speak. You find that “family” often tend to see you as a burden then. And can’t handle it. If you’re lucky, you have a new friend named Judy that comes in and takes you to surgery and cares for you for months when you cannot do for yourself.

Nearly six months later, I’m still battling with that recuperation. Six months out of twelve. But you can always look at the person in front of you in the supermarket, or maybe behind you, and they have it much worse. So you put it all in perspective.

And you realize that if you’d gone in that other direction, you wouldn’t have found a Judy like I did. And that truly would have been a shame.

Five years ago, just to put this into proper sequence, I was about to begin my first blog. I pondered it five years ago today. I needed a place to put my thoughts, a place to escape to. A place to escape from.

I felt like I was in a dinghy shot full of holes. When I’d manage to get one patched, another would spring forth and water would shoot through. I was drowning in a lifeless, loveless marriage. They never start out that way, of course. But on the day you marry, you of course never know that. You have stars in your eyes and hope in your heart.

And so on the last day of the last month of 2007, I sat at my computer and wondered where to start. But somehow I found the words, and I hit Publish. I didn’t quite find my niche with that one. Or the one after that. But I did in April 2009, when I began this blog. It felt like home.

I no longer live in the same house. I no longer tend those gardens. I don’t even know how long I’ll be able to stay here. But that’s just four walls. You realize you can create “home” wherever you land, as long as there’s a roof over your head.

I look out into the skies and wonder what’s ahead. All of us do. I guess the not knowing keeps our heads up in uncertain times. And like everybody else these days, I’m facing uncertain times.

This may sound strange, but I like to walk around cemeteries to think sometimes. It’s quiet. You wander amongst the graves and tombstones. And wonder what their lives were like.

Sometimes I find my answers written across the sky there.

Five years later I’m still here, plugging away. Chugging out pretty much a post a day. It is cathartic for me. I imagine you feel you know me by now. Certainly you’ve been good to me. You’ve been beside me on the trail as I wandered.

And for that, as I look toward a new year, I am immensely thankful.