Still Green and Pleasant

Flowering tree at the Keukenhof Garden, Lisse, Netherlands

In 2011, when Joe and I were in Germany on a temporary assignment, I was posting on this blog three times a week. Then we received wonderful news: we were being sent back to Germany to live. I left to pack up the house, expecting to be able to pick up the blog in a couple of months.

That was two years ago.

By the time I came back to Germany, I had a new writing assignment: preparing my daughter Elena’s memoir for publication and writing a second memoir–my memoir–to match it. These memoirs focus on our lives with Elena’s adolescent anorexia nervosa. Going back into all those painful memories left me exhausted and overwhelmed. I had no more time or energy for the blog.

Halfway through hellish rewrites, I discovered that my poor blog wasn’t even displaying on Android browsers at all, and my website was looking shabby and outdated. I’ll have to do a major project when I finish these books, I thought. I’ll have to rework every single page on the site. And while I’m at it, I’ll need to move to a new web server… export the blog to a new location… make everything HTML5-compatible… optimize the whole thing for phones and tabs…

Thoughts like this didn’t help my stress level!

But now it’s all finished. Vanishing Girl, Elena’s memoir, has just gone through copyedit. Hope and Other Luxuries, my memoir, is right behind it. We should have the line edit and copyedit finished by the end of June. The website is finished, too. Every single little bitty code on every one of my site’s 138 webpages has gotten tweaked. The whole shebang is on a shiny new Linux server somewhere in the cloud (a.k.a. Dallas, Texas). The blog is up and running again in its new home. And I have time again to look out the window and see the green.

It is still green. VERY green. And other colors too. I can’t wait to tell you more about it.

Tulips at Keukenhof Garden, Lisse, Netherlands

To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page. Photos taken in April, 2014, in Lisse, Netherlands. Text and photos copyright 2013 by Clare B. Dunkle. No copying in whole or in part without the express written consent of the author.