This blog is nearly twenty years old. Twenty. Imagine that. My blog can buy its own smokes. (What? they changed the age for that? Fine -- it can still vote, right?)

If a TV show waited six years between seasons, the new season would probably get called a reboot, instead of a new season. I'm not certain what that gets called in blog terms. I've generally held my silence since 2014, and have simultaneously regretted doing so while being deeply grateful I did. I've been asking myself if my silence was permanent, and I have repeatedly been unable to answer the question, which may be its own answer. Two trains of thought kept recurring to me:

1. Social media makes it relatively simple to share out quasi-public, throwaway tidbits, allowing you the pretense of keeping in touch with people who live far away.
2. Anything posted to a website or platform you do not own can be taken away from you.

My (relative) silence allowed me time to repeat the process of grieving and growing a few times. You can do a lot of it in six years of quiet:

• buy a little condo
• adopt, adore, and say goodbye to a special-needs bonded pair of cats
• change jobs, get promoted, change jobs again
• meet a boy
• invite the boy to move in with you thanks to your adopted city's housing crisis
• adopt, adore, and say goodbye to the boy's feisty, elderly tuxie cat (she was totally a marshmallow)
• visit Australia, New Zealand, China, Cuba, Morocco, and Spain
• watch every Best Picture winner with the boy (we still need to catch up on last year's though)
• remarry
• take up garment sewing
• scrap my 18-year-old car with no plan to replace it

I've wished a few times that I had entries from my first couple of years in Portland to look back on and reference, but that wish is vastly overshadowed by the acknowledgment of how desperate I was for some measure of privacy. The period of years after my first husband's motorcycle crash were profoundly, gut-wrenchingly public, and after living through that experience, my gradual transition from numbness to grief to acceptance to rebuilding was best done in private.

I'm not sure what I want to do with this blog, or if I want to do anything with it at all. Noah points out occasionally that the Internet Hate Machine™ is only a single unlucky post away on any social media platform, and it's tough to work up the interest to write and speak even vaguely publicly with that ominous non-diagetic music tuning up in the background any time you hit Save on a post.

That being said, hi. I'm Amy. I make things, sometimes with fabric and sometimes with words. I have a tall, opinionated spouse and a squeaky, derpy house panther. My hair has a prominent silver streak now, and we're speeding through about 12 countries in the next three months. I'm not sure if I want to have a blog any more, but I can't seem to make myself delete it, so here we are.