Greetings!  

In her book All Standing: The Remarkable Story of the Jeanie Johnston, The Legendary Irish Famine Ship, the author tells of when the ship was battered by a hurricane. The captain had his wife and two year old child along with a crew of fifteen or so. As the ship began to sink everyone climbed up into the rigging of the sails.  There they hung in hope for fourteen days sucking the sails of water to stay alive. At the fourteenth day a rescue ship happened by and brought the 18 crew members and captain and family on board. When the last person left the Jeanie Johnston safely, she went under.

We heard an interview with the author Kathryn Miles while driving back from our ranch after a hard weekend of sorting through our lives. While Jerry's health is much improved, he still wasn't able to stand for long and stayed in the house while six of us worked our tails off putting jacks into the auction pile and old paint into the hazard pile. We found old paper (a manuscript I'd been asked to read was stuck behind the table saw) and it went to the burn pile.  A seeder and sprayer went into the buyer wants -to- look- at- pile.  Trash went into the back of the pick-up and then there was the scrap pile. We didn't move everything into the scrap pile that belonged there because items were large (like old plows) so stuff sat in place awaiting the arrival of "the scrapper." Guess which pile was the largest?  Jerry's Pile included all the things he must bring to our home in Bend. And each item was an ache as I put some of into the horse trailer for him and yes, when he wasn't there, sent others to the auction pile.

I drove Jerry down from the house to the shop once each day and he snarled at me for not letting him have more in his pile, insisted that a weed burner be taken from auction and put in the Buyer wants to look at pile and growled about things he just wanted to keep that I wasn't agreeing to given the fragile nature of his bones and recovery from seven breaks and two back surgeries since October and how unlikely it might be that he'd ever pull an engine from a car again.

My heart hurt with the sorting despite the friendship of the Kuettel family (3) who were troopers of angelic proportions offering support for my "no" and encouraging Jerry at the same time. To sort through a life...lives...is more wrenching than I'd imagined.  We argued about Deere John now deceased in front of the shop door where we must move out Jerry's lathe, table and ban saw, and the old Nissan he wants to refurbish. We disagreed with how to get rid of him (Deere John, the tractor). Our words pelted each other like the hard hail of a spring storm.

Later we heard the story of the Jeanie Johnston and those hopeful people sucking on sails, toddler in tow.  "At least we're not hanging from a rigging," I said. "We've had a grand life on that ranch; quenched deep soul yearnings, brought a family into focus and had joys and sorrows and hopes met beyond our wildest imagination. We can't now let a failure to let go of "things" bring us to sink.

We're not recovering from hurricane Sandy or Irene. We're not suffering from hunger as chronicled by the film A Place at the Table.  We are not waking up to the news that someone we love has perished in a accident or in combat in a desert. In so many ways we are not hanging from the rigging.

We've had the luxury of leaving and not by rescue of another ship but by choice, to move to another place in this journey of living. A Michael Card lyric reminds us "It's hard to imagine from the things we leave behind." Soaring joy will come again. And when we stumble in this new reality - as we surely will - we will hopefully remind ourselves that no matter what the turmoil, we are not hanging from the rigging.

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Lots of changes are happening in the publishing world. We now have ebooks, self-publishing, Kickstarter (a site to raise money for projects like publishing a book or getting a record produced) as well as more traditional publishing. A recent survey of writers divided into categories of traditional, self-published, aspiring and hybrid (both traditional and self-published) suggests that 68% of writers of all ilks believe having a traditional publishers lends credibility to their work while 1/3 of traditionally published writers feel that their publishers don't do all that much to help promote their work, don't understand digital books and keep too much of the money! Kind of a complicated response, isn't it?

This past month I became a "hybrid" with the release of A Simple Gift of Comfort.  Jerry took many of the photographs along with a photographer friend Nancy Lloyd who also designed the book.  A couple of shots of our ranch are there and several from the Aurora Colony community, subject of four of my books. A niece helped me find the Michigan printer and reworked a few glitches (In-Design is the computer program being used by printers these days). And now I have the task of getting the book into distribution so readers can find it in places other than my website. Just filling out the first form proved daunting.... So know that traditional publishers will always have a place of appreciation in my world. I'll let you know when the books are launched and available through other book-buying sources.