A Rose By Any Other Name

I have had a terrible writer's block this year; I can sit at the computer and stare at a blank screen, willing my fingers to move and they can not. I have tried many writers' methods of getting jump started - but those seem to work only on my fiction writing. I maintain my fiction work on a separate site, and that one seems to be flourishing this year, but my poor blog - the one I write for my family - is really suffering.

I know that the move has something to do with it. Sometimes when I open the blog, I look at the title and description, and I feel like I'm no longer on "the path less traveled." Living out on the farm, working toward sustainable living, having our crazy adventures made me feel like we had taken a path of living separate and different from the average bear.

Now we live in town, just like every regular Joe. Our adventures are still pretty entertaining, of course, but I think that it's time that they fall under a new title.

My love of great literature generates a tendency toward finding a metaphor everywhere I go, in everything I do. Unless I'm in the company of a fellow literary junkie, I try to keep all my references to myself, and live in my own head much of the time. When I started the blog I felt inspired by Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken. It was a both a literal and figurative representation of our life on the farm, and I wanted the name of my blog to reflect that. Of course, every possible variation of that was already in use, so The Path Less Traveled was as close as I could get.

Once I decided that I needed a new name for our new chapter, I began searching for the right moniker under which we would continue our family tales. I pored over my literary favorites, looking for allegories and references that felt right. I'm not sure why Ray Bradbury rose to the surface; I have so much love for Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison...I feel like Emerson and Thoreau wrote the template for my life. But Bradbury's collection of The Martian Chronicles has a stubborn pull. I teach several of his short stories to my 8th graders; he masterfully built a collection around the idea that humans would start over on Mars. His stories are realistic yet fantastic. His characters have depth, they are real in their interactions, despite the surreal environment in which they find themselves. Each story has a deep human truth buried underneath the bells and whistles of a future imagined by that great storyteller.

We are starting over, in a way, by moving to town. We've turned a page and imagine a future for ourselves beyond the borders of the farm where we began. So The Gudahl Chronicles it is.

We move forward, we evolve, just like the Bittering family from Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed, the final story in Bradbury's collection. We cling to our identity, yet press outward in an effort to acclimate. I just love that story; it used to make me shiver when I read it, anticipating some dark outcome from an unseen threat. The threat, it seems, is no threat at all; the change comes from within. It's wonderful. Dark They Were And Golden Eyed (full text)