October 2021: Nine months, 859 miles; ten months, 940 miles

I am still on track for 1100 miles this year, and 2400 miles over the last two years.

Even yesterday, with no formal exercise planned, I managed to accumulate 3.25 measured miles walking about Madison in the crisp, early morning air, from Bascomb Hall to the state capitol building.

Then today, before noon and under clearing skies, another 3.3 miles with Dena, without even really thinking about it. That put me over 940 miles in the first ten months of 2021, leaving me 160 miles more to complete in the next nine weeks, or about 18 miles a week.

Besides walking, my basic home duties consist of domestic indoor chores and a variety of outside activity, the latter including mowing the lawn and plowing and shoveling snow.

It is difficult but not impossible to find joy during the political pandemic madness. There is too much time to dwell on too much noise from around the world, and even an attuned brain will find it hard to filter out the facts from the noise, to engage in critical thinking, to state committed to core values, to keep faith in traditions and to question traditional institutions, all to try to find a place of calm in the storm. Wisconsin provides some immediate solace, with a more traditional ethos running through life in northeastern Wisconsin. In some respects, Harrison is like Eden, a farming and dairy community, only Eden probably peaked about the time we moved into town in 1958, while Harrison is showing strong growth and the growing pains that I imagine most of the old-timers in Eden would relish today. Despite New York's blue political nature, Erie County, outside the Democrat corruption of Buffalo, was a pretty conservative place and may still be today, while Buffalo shrinks and shrinks, with fewer than half the number of people living in Buffalo today versus the numbers living there in 1950, when Buffalo was about the tenth-largest city in the United States in those long-past, industrial, glory days.

Buffalo long had access to water and plentiful electric power, with a strong work ethic among a predominantly blue-collar and agricultural city and county population. But things changed for the worse when the elite, predominantly Catholic population either holed up in decaying mansions in the city or abandoned the city for the suburbs. This included the University of Buffalo; what could have been a strong economic engine, along with some great healthcare institutions, but the decline of heavy industry and the growth of the elderly population sapped the city of its productivity and tax base.

There is joy in having learned some lessons and being able to leave the Buffalo area, even as I lament the loss of roots and social connections. Eden was great place to grow and, by the time I turned 21, it was time for me to go.