Greetings, loyal readers (and new readers, also). Today we are crossing the threshold of 70,000 visits to this poetry and photography blog.
I started the blog in October of 2016, not dreaming that we would get an average of 23,000 page-views per year, or that they would be coming from well over a hundred countries, representing all continents except Antarctica. I had been writing poetry off and on for most of my life, and I had been a serious amateur photographer for some fifty years. I did not anticipate, though, that these things would find the resonance that they have found.
2016 was an eventful year. My wife, Sandy, and I traveled around the Horn of South America, a trip that produced both poetry and photography. It also allowed me to meet some dear on-line friends in Argentina and Chile. Later that year, I traveled alone to Ireland, to meet my Irish relatives for the first time. It was a grand trip. I was able to see the house in which my maternal grandmother had grown up, as well as the very spot where her foot had left the soil of Ireland for the last time. I was able, as well, to meet many of my twenty-two living cousins in Ireland, who turned out to be delightful people. That trip produced even more poetry and photography. There were also some unfortunate political events in that year, but I'll not darken the day by speaking of them.
2017 began on a sad note when Sandy and I lost a very dear Uruguayan friend in a tractor accident. He had done a lot of work on our beach house, and we were never able to go there without thinking about him and missing him. In the latter part of the year we took a bus trip trough the southern part of Brazil, going as far as Rio, which raised our spirits.
In early 2018 I began to write and translate in my Udugi language, which is based on Tsalagi (Cherokee) vocabulary, seamlessly joined with a simple, Esperanto-like grammar. The language is generating a lot of interest, and I consider it to be an important part of my legacy.
In March of 2019 we sold the house in Uruguay that we had lived in for six years. Relocating back to the "old country" was a big and complicated deal, especially with a dog, and was the genesis of several poems. We now live in Pasco County, Florida, which is the naturist capital of the USA.
A focus of 2019 has been my work on my proposed solution to the Synoptic Problem, and the related Hebrew Gospel of Matthew. It's fascinating and rewarding work, and it, too, has generated considerable interest. Meanwhile, 2019 continues to be an extremely prolific year for my poetry and photography.
As usual, I would like to thank all of you for your continued interest and enthusiasm. Thank you for making this blog so successful. Wadó. ꮹꮩ.
Text and image © 2019 by Donald Jacobson Traxler.
