Taking a new road

I wish now that I'd started this blog years ago. There's so much to tell about this island and what life is like here, I feel like I'll never be able to cover it all. I'll keep trying, but I'm also starting a new blog: a Caring Bridge website for Gary. He was diagnosed this week with cancer. Our life has been turned completely upside down.

I was going to stop this blog when we got this horrible, outrageous news -- I was going to stop everything -- but as we learned more and starting getting a plan in place this week, it occurred to me that I need to keep this blog going. It's about the wonderful life that Gary has made on a formerly empty wooded island, and of all times, this is the time to be writing about it. If it weren't for him I wouldn't even know what a shrike is, or how to pump water, or what it's like to bake bread in a Finnish bake oven.

We'll soon be moving operations to our house in St. Paul (which we never did get around to selling), and Gary will start his therapy at the Masonic Center at the University of Minnesota. A team of specialists there will be taking on his case, and we know we're in top-notch hands with them. If you're on my email list, you'll soon be getting a note about the Caring Bridge site. We plan to come to the island as often as we can in the coming months, for an Up North Fix.