I don't have a blog in me today.

I’ve been posting a blog on Friday mornings since January of 2019.

The night we moved in to our first apartment in Nashville, there was a torrential downpour. Two days after we finished moving in, the apartment burned down. When we moved into our new hours, there was a tornado. Then a pandemic. It was a rough time. It’s over though. The next year was better.

Today I almost just let it go.

“No one will notice anyway,” I said to myself. “You can just pick up again next Friday and nothing will have changed.”

That’s all probably true, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So, I’ll just tell it like it is today, and then let myself off the hook.

I’m having a hard time.

It’s nothing life threatening—a lot of people, many people, are far worse off than I am—and I’ll be okay, but I’m tired. It’s a lot of little things not worth mentioning and a few big things that I’m either not ready to talk about, can’t talk about, or don’t really know how to stuff into a blog post.

I don’t really like complaining either, unless there’s some wisdom to impart by having gone through what I’ve gone through, and I’m not far enough on the other side to have gleaned any wisdom worth imparting.

When I was a kid, my mom had a little library in the corner of our den. Just two built-in shelves creating a little nook were filled with books. I used to sit over there and pull them down at random, usually grabbing the ones with pretty covers, searching for pictures I had seen before and liked. (I discovered Salvador Dali at age four and used to constantly hunt for the picture of The Temptation of Saint Anthony so I could stare at it.) This became even more interesting once I was able to read, of course, and I remember coming across a poem by Theodore Tilton called Even This Shall Pass Away. If you haven’t read it, look it up, it’s a good one. And it stayed with me just as surely as Dali did.

So, I’m not great right now, and that’s okay. We all go through rough patches. I don’t have much else to say about it. But even this shall pass away.