Tracks

There are silent visitors to my world and I’m curious about the tracks they leave as they pass by. A little research determines the identity of the four-legged creature that walks across my snowy driveway. It’s a raccoon. There are also rabbit and deer tracks. I enjoy their company. The raccoon and the rabbit take shelter under the back deck; the deer are migrating through their winter range seeking anything edible not buried in snow. There are also the visitors to this blog. The number at the bottom of the page indicates how many have visited the site, a miniscule number considering some sites get thousands or millions of hits each day. I’m grateful that anyone reads the blog in the first place. I use a website that shows me the “tracks” blog viewers leave. This is where it gets interesting. The stats of a viewer are broken down into many categories: IP address, city, state, country, the URL that got you to my blog, keywords on a search engine, and the length of time spent on the site. I recognize a few visitors as easily as recognizing a rabbit track. The rest, however, are obscure and ephemeral and that tweaks my curiosity. There have been readers from the U.S.A., the U.K., Australia and the Netherlands. I began this blogging effort as a way to describe my efforts to lay down new tracks in Oregon after years of familiar ones in California. I’m beginning to realize that writing and photographing for this journey will be basically a one-sided conversation. Although there is a way to leave comments most visitors to "Moving On" do not. That’s o.k. I look at a lot of other blogs and don’t often write comments either. It’s easier to remain anonymous. I respect that and whatever viewer information I glean will never be disclosed, period. If you’d care to drop a note or a comment, thanks in advance. I’ll throw a virtual party for the 1000th viewer. You can track that one yourself.