I’ve posted nothing here for a good many years. I had set the site to feature poetry (which you can now see under the ‘poems’ heading); and I had not posted there since December 2024. Until August of that year I worked on a collection of poems I am calling “Master of the King’s Music.” That collection remains unfinished. In late August 2024, I contracted a new strain of COVID, against which I was not vaccinated, on a trip to Texas to celebrate my brother and sister in law’s 60th wedding anniversary. I spent eight days in the hospital in Fort Worth and another couple of weeks recuperating at my brother and sister and in law’s house before limping home to St. Louis. I now require round the clock oxygen support at the rate of four lpm. We were unable to find a portable concentrator that can generate more than three lpm and had to settle for two most of the trip home; hence, the limping (we carried some size K tanks with us for relief but rationed them to avoid using them up).’

COVID sapped both my desire and my ability to write. Now that both are beginning to return, I hope to write poetry again but have decided to start with blogging. Many of my posts from 2020 and 2021 seem as germane now as they did when I wrote them. I’ve left a couple of them on this front page as a bridge between then and now.