Our own private Idaho

Yeah, I know.  You thought your favorite correspondent, essayist, blogger, whatever, had died.  Or, should I say, passed away.

But no.  It's just been a continuation of my post-pandemic inability to sit down and focus on any writing of any length longer than a Facebook entry.  Not because of any kind of Covid brain fog, but just because the isolation enforced by the pandemic is no longer present to encourage such concentration.

Actually, I have just recently recovered from my first and only bout of Covid.  Symptoms for five weeks, approximately. No worse than a bad cold, and in fact I spent my two weeks travel in Italy under its curse without realizing the reason that I was coughing so much and napping so often in the afternoons.  I'm grateful that masks and great care kept me from contracting the problem for the first year, and super grateful for  the shots and boosters that make a potentially deadly disease now no worse for me than a "bad cold."

But I no longer have Covid as an excuse for my mental laziness.  And you'll have to wait one more week to see if my writing bug starts biting again.  I leave tomorrow for the depths of Darkest Idaho, for a family gathering.  A world where political views are revolting, but the people are personally warm and friendly.

My family is a liberal anomaly existing uneasily within that environment.

As you know from earlier posts, my sister lives near Challis Idaho, which lies between Stanley and Salmon, if that helps you non-Idahoans.  The primary reason for this week's gathering is that my nephew Denny, who has been teaching for several years in Chiang Mai, Thailand, will be vacationing back in the States with his wife Jessie and his daughter Maury.  Maury has just completed the equivalent of American eighth grade, and starts high school in Chiang Mai in the fall.  She is American born and mainly reared, but -- I'm told -- by now speaks Thai as fluently as she does English.

My brother and his wife are driving up from Los Angeles, and there will be others present, but I don't recall exactly who. 

Challis is always fun to visit, winter or summer.  My sister has horses to ride -- I think she now has seven -- and a big house on fifty acres of woodland and pasture, with a just-completed one-room cabin hide-away, where company can lounge about and live off her family's hospitality.  We are bonding -- as if we needed it -- over a group rafting trip on Saturday.  I return to Seattle on Sunday.

So, here is my second blog entry for June 2023.  It doesn't really count as an essay, and probably is of no interest to anyone but my future self when I try to reconstruct the year 2023!  While you await something more meaty, more substantive, from me -- have a nice summer, y'all!