Eight years. That’s how long WordPress tells me that I’ve been blogging for.
Eight years – my anniversary passing last week. Wondering if there was anything significant about this number, and knowing nothing of numerology, I looked it up:
It seems that eight is male, who’d have though that numbers had gender? And it represents infinity-is this a sign that I’m going to blog, like, forever?
What about the number outside of numerology? Where would I be without Google?
Eight is the natural number following seven and preceding nine.
Now that I can get my head around! It’s that number in between seven and nine. I should have put money on it.
Then next there was this:
An eighth is a common measure of marijuana, as in an eighth of an ounce.
Hmm . . . maybe Jackdaw will continue flying high, so to speak?
On other blog anniversaries I’ve tended to think about the posts I’ve done in the past, the journey I’ve been on. This time, though, I started thinking about the people that I’ve come to know along the way. This was prompted by a comment I made tonight on a US friend’s blog ( https://laurabrunolilly.com/blog/ ) about how I once met a fellow blogger face to face, quite by chance, at a funeral of all places. I recognised her and (re)introduced myself, and she later blogged about this coming together of both her ‘real’ life and her ‘virtual’ life.
There are people that have been flying with City Jackdaw since its very conception, there’s some that have joined along the way, and there were some who fell away.
I took some time to look at a few of my early posts, recognising among the comments names of old friends who, for whatever reason, appear not to blog anymore.
Some of them were very generous with their time and their friendship back then, and I felt genuinely saddened that they were no longer around. I wondered what they were up to now in their own part of the world, and hoped that life was treating them well.
Sometimes it’s the not knowing, and being deprived of a chance to express my gratitude, say farewell and wish them luck.
But sometimes it is the knowing-
there was a woman who read my posts and often left encouraging comments. I’d noticed her absence for a while before I learned the reason: she had died at the hands of her husband. Awful, and I was grieving the senseless end of a person I’d never met.
Wow! What has happened to this post?! I was supposed to be celebrating my anniversary!
I think instead I should just take this opportunity to express my gratitude now to all of you still following City Jackdaw, and hope we have some time together yet. If life does take you away from this virtual world at some point in the future, and you see in advance that approaching fork in the road, come and say goodbye first.
I’d appreciate that. I really am the sentimental sort.
City Jackdaw 