Daily Journal 1/13/26

Up at 5am this morning, then over to my ex-wife’s for breakfast and chit-chat with her and our son (who attended the State Farm Show yesterday). Then back here at 6:45 so I could be at my desk by 7am. But for those 15 minutes between arriving home and beginning the day’s writing, I first had to walk over to my dock and enjoy this.

I love the Susquehanna River this time of year. The rest of the year, it’s noisy and full of people — lawyers, doctors, and trust-fund kids on their big, ugly boats; tourists on the guided tour river ferry; blue-collar guys out fishing in their bass boats; and an endless array of out-of-towners occupying the AirBnbs like some occupying invasion force (many of the homes around us have been turned into AirBnBs now — first by the older retirees or their kin who own the homes, and then by the Amish who are not ones to ever miss a moneymaking opportunity. Indeed, one of my Amish neighbors has bought up seven houses along the shore, and he rents them all out). Spring and summer, the river echoes with a constant barrage of droning jet skis and revving speedboats and chugging boat motors and five hundred different kinds of musical genres blasted from five hundred different kinds of boats, and yet they all invariably seem to be blasting either Jimmy Buffet, Lee Greenwood, or various badly autotuned hip-hop songs.

But this time of year? Here in the winter? It’s just us, and a few neighbors, and the only sounds on the river are the geese and ducks who didn’t migrate further south, and the seagulls up from the Chesapeake Bay. There are no boats, and the only motors you hear are the engines of commuters on their way to work in either York or Lancaster. The Mason-Dixon Trail is deserted, save for me and the deer, and whatever animals opted to not fully hibernate.

The retirement plan calls for Mary and I to eventually move to West Virginia, living on 42 acres that has been in my family pretty much since we came across the ocean from Ireland all those generations ago. And I look forward to that. I do.

But I will miss these quiet sunrises over the water, when it’s just me and the waterfowl out there, and the rest of the world is still asleep.

~

Lunch today with author Robert Swartwood, which is the kind of thing I can get back to doing now that the store has moved fully online.

Something else I can get back to doing is writing full-time, so I’m going to head off now and do just that. Except that it won’t really be writing. Not yet. I’ve got to spend the day getting this AuthorCon preliminary programming schedule into some kind of coherent draft.

Have a great day.