I'm back

I have to be honest. I have been struggling with resuming writing in this blog for a few weeks ago. I have been sitting here for about 40 minutes trying to figure out how to start writing again. Write a sentence, delete it, write another sentence, and delete it again. I went on like this for a while until I told myself to get a grip and just start writing.

I can only think of seemingly ordinary things to write about, such as the winter solstice. I always like the winter solstice because it is the shortest day of the year. The winter season lay ahead of us, but knowing that shortest day of the year is over always gives me some hope. It does take awhile before the longer days are noticeable. I write this in early February. A couple of weeks ago, I did notice that the days are a little longer. We go out to dinner to celebrate the winter solstice. I realized that this was my second winter solstice. This may have been a unique and perhaps once in a lifetime occurrence because I was in Malawi, south of the equator on June 21, 2007.

On that day, being from the northern hemisphere, I automatically thought that summer had started. Only to realize that, in fact, it was the first day of winter. And being in the tropics, the day was eleven hours long and much warmer than my usual first day of winter.

So in an otherwise ordinary year, I experienced two winter solstices.