If you have been following The Low Gravy, you might have noticed things look a little different around here. In early 2021, I went to downtown Nashville to survey and document the damage and recovery efforts following the horrific Christmas Day bombing a few weeks before. Somewhere in my posting my photos from that day, things on my site went haywire. I am a photographer, an artist, writer, and creator. I am not, necessarily, tech savvy. Self-publishing a blog was always quite a stretch for me. Try as I might, I could not get things straightened out. Photos from one post would appear in a post from two years ago, etc, etc.,...I will not bore you with all the details. After some tech help from my site host, I went about what I hoped would be a site "cleanup." My goal was to provide a cleaner, more intentional, space for y'all. All good intentions, right? I was editing late one night, while I was very tired and should have been in bed, when I made a terrible mistake. While my intention was to delete one single, older post, what I accomplished was deleting every post from the time I switched the blog over to this platform (yes, I added it up and we are talking somewhere around 6 years worth of blog posts) in one single, irreversible, action. I was devastated. In the immediate aftermath, I was able to recover a few older files. I immediately reposted as much of the origianl content as I could. Then I began going through my personal archives to attempt to begin the reconstruction of others that I felt I could piece together in some coherent way. Somewhere in there, it all became too much. I was overwhelmed. I thought very seriously about just shutting it all down. But, I didn't. Instead, I left what was there and quit. Not creating, not travelling, just sharing. I was content for the site to be a time capsule, preserved in whatever state it was in, for as long as it would last.
A year and a half has passed and I have decided that The Low Gravy is not finished. Not yet, anyway. I will begin, slowly, adding content again. I will still share content that might have been here before in some form. I will share mostly new content. In the meantime, if you see a blank page, or a link with little content, you will know why. My heart still aches a little when I think of how much I shared that was lost with a mistaken click of the wrong box. There is a great Blaze Foley song that John Prine recorded once upon a time, called Clay Pigeons. It is a song that has spoke to me in a meaningful way over the years. I was still new in Nashville when I first heard it and it has been a companion of my journey in the years since. In it, the narrator sings,
"I'm tired of running round looking for answers to questions that I already know. I could build me a castle with memories, just to have somewhere to go. Count the days and the nights that it takes to get back into the saddle again, Feed the pigeons some clay, Turn the night into day, And start talking again when I know what to say."
I'm not sure I know what to say yet, but I'm ready to start talking again. Thanks for hanging around y'all. I'll try my best to make it worth it.