The Long Way Home.

WordPress wished me a happy 17th anniversary this morning.

Seventeen years.

I confess I had completely lost track. I’ve also lost reading glasses, passwords, and the occasional parked car, so this felt entirely on brand.

Still, it’s funny how one little notification can send you wandering backwards.

I am a marker of time. It’s probably a very Irish habit. We remember dates. We attach meaning to them. We keep track of anniversaries, arrivals, departures, and the exact year something happened, even if we can’t remember why we walked into a room.

Which is why I noticed that today comes with a few milestones attached.

Thirty-eight years ago today, I became a permanent resident of the United States.

Ten years ago today, I was beginning a new chapter in my work life.

And seventeen years ago, I registered this blog.

A little card from the U.S. government declaring that I could stay. Permanently. A little blog notification reminding me that I’ve been writing here for seventeen years. 

Documents and dates. Proof of belonging.

And yet, after all this time, I’m asking what makes a place home.

When I registered this blog, I had no idea what it would become. I wasn’t trying to become a writer. I was mostly trying to figure things out, which is still, as it turns out, an accurate description of my writing process.

A few years later, breast cancer arrived uninvited, and somewhere in the middle of recovery I started taking notes that turned into essays. I suppose because I had more questions than answers. 

I still do.

The blog has followed me through unexpected plot twists -cancer, widowhood, leaving Arizona for Mexico, finding my way back to Northern Ireland, picking up my violin again, and somehow singing in a cover band.

I’m still not entirely sure how that last one happened.

The scenery has changed. The questions remain the same.

Where is home? What makes us belong somewhere? Why can a song we haven’t heard in decades bring us right back to a person or a place? Why do ordinary days  become the ones we remember forever?

Looking back, this little corner of the internet became an of accidental record of a life in progress.

At some point, you came along too.

You read. You commented. You encouraged. You stuck around while I wrote about cancer and grief and home and memory and all the other things that refuse to stay neatly in their own boxes.

Writers need readers. More than that, writers need people willing to follow them down the occasional rabbit hole.

Thank you for doing that.

These days, the essays have a new home at A Homing Bird on Substack.

The address has changed. The questions haven’t.

My latest essay, When the Smoke Clears, takes me back to Northern Ireland and asks what remains after the flames are gone.

If we first met here on WordPress, thank you for being part of the story.

Seventeen years.

I’m still wondering what happens next.