Winter in America

Except for a brief interlude, I have lived in the city my entire adult life, but a few years ago, I bought some raw land in Windham County and built, largely with my own hands, a house and barn. It's in a farm town. The town center has a general store, a post office, two churches, and a combination auto repair/tractor repair/general tinkering business. Yes, there is a cannon and a gazebo on the green. It's an 8 mile drive to anything resembling a supermarket, and that barely qualifies.

I'm finally moving in, but only part time, because I still have a job in the big city -- 45 miles away. I've been writing a blog called Stayin' Alive for many years now, which focuses on my professional interests in public health and medicine. Now, I've found myself thinking (and feeling) more and more about the new, rural world I'm just getting to know, and wanting to write more personal material. Getting out of the city somehow makes me more reflective, or reflective in a different way, but I don't want to derail Stayin' Alive. And so this new platform.

From my lonely outpost in the woods, our national experiment, which looked hopeful when I was young, seems exhausted, running down into failure. If there is hope for us, I believe we will only find it with the help of deep introspection and the courage to confront all the painful truths that surround us. So I hope we can do some of that here.

How and when people will find this I don't know. People found Stayin' Alive, one by one, over the years, so perhaps that will happen here as well. I do not expect to write every day, maybe only once or twice a week, and I'm told that discourages traffic. Not a concern. I'll write anyway, when I have something to say.