I've been thinking a lot lately about this very simple aspect of keeping a blog:
When you need them most, they are there...sometimes when little else is and few people are.
But, when you no longer need them, it is time for them to go away, or at least change or shift.
Do you see where I'm going with this? Oh! And where-I'm-going is not that I'm giving up blogging, so don't worry about that.
I've been thinking about all of this since a few things have happened recently...One, is that a notable handful of very beloved blog-ladies decided to close up shop, because it had just run its course in their lives. This prompted me to think about what sort of a forever-mutating place they (the blogs) have in our day-to-day.
The other is that I, myself, Emily Blackapple have found myself needing the blog and blog-land less and less. I still want it in my life. I love it still, of course, and have no plans of giving it up, but I don't exactly need it so acutely now, do you know what I mean?
There have been times over the last year (especially the lonely Brooklyn days, good god) that I received so much comfort by way of the tiny network of voices whispering "you are not alone, you are not alone". The voices weren't only comments on Inside a Black Apple, or even emails necessarily. Often they were other people's photographs on their own blogs, their own admissions of vulnerability or weakness, their stalwart self-awareness and thoughtfulness. So many like-minded people that I could look to and say, "There are so many people that like the same things as I do, that value what I value, they're just scattered". Beautiful packages from friends-through-the-wires. The lovely and differing ways in which other people choose to run their lives, and allow a window in. The dedication to "curating your own world", as I put it in this particularly sad post from last summer. I think it was re-reading that post that finally drove home the differing things that the blog means and has meant to me over the year-plus that it's been chronicling my life and cottage industry.
For the foreseeable future, I promise that I'll be right here. I love it here. And I'm so sorry if this has been a meandering, tedious post. It will be back to the regularly-scheduled arts and crafts tomorrow, promise. I guess I just wanted to say that I'm so very grateful that I found you, and you found me, at just the right time...I suppose, at the Mary-Poppins-time.
PS: Thank you, dear Beth, for making me aware that my brain is a mush of fictional nannies that caused me to previously attribute a quote of the far lesser nanny (the one called Mcphee) to the one that is Practically Perfect in Every Way.
