It's been a long time since I've wanted to simply express what it is like to live here in the Northern Neck. Part of that has to do with time. Part of that has to do with a lot of stressors. Just as you are probably finding new ways to involve yourself with the world, perhaps this makes sense for me.

I'm assuming that by and large people who are reading this are in suburbs or cities and are perhaps thinking about being by the river, or buying near the river, or just thinking about the freedom to walk along a beach. I realize that I live in pretty much nowhere, albeit a nowhere I've come to love. This isn't meant to be any sort of a sales pitch, but really a diversion.

Living in Richmond county there really aren't too many of us who are full timers. Referring to the Historic Sites in Virginia's Northern Neck and Essex County is how I'm getting my numbers (the book may be available through Amazon and if not and if you'd like one, let me know kam129@aol.com and I have about a dozen I could sell....the money goes to MPNNP which is the Middle Peninsula Northern Neck Historic Preservation group).  ((Learned by checking online that Amazon is out of this book but that UVA Press has copies you can purchase online. They collaborated with the group who wrote and put this together.)) So this helpful book informs me that the population of this county was 6,985 in 1790. By 1940 the population had fallen slightly to 6,634 but by the year 2000 it had risen to 8,809. ((This is a Monday morning addition after my Sunday post. Turns out that Richmond county population in 2017 was 8,939. Not a big increase over 2000.)) Can't say that there has been a huge influx of people....don't you agree?

I've thought that maybe I'd provide a "day in the life" sort of blog here or it might be a "week in the life" and that it would be about small town USA during this enforced stay at home time. It may bore some. It may provide escape to some. It may be that when you see these lines and lines of text you just quickly run to where the numbers are posted (and I promise to post numbers weekly since there will never be a time like this and so it will be interesting however the chips fall).

So this is my beginning. I got up early and took the dogs for a ride. Started to clean up my vegetable beds. Picked some flowers and am rearranging a room. Every day I try to set some intentions and then I try to be happy if I achieve at least a quarter or a half of them. I will try to do this post tomorrow and maybe on Tuesday or Wednesday I'll put up numbers. In the olden days I used to do a bit of specail review of properties price at a million dollar plus. Perhaps it's time to look at how many have been selling and how many are on the market. It may be that they hardly sell during this upcoming year, or it may be that people who have that kind of cash are looking for something tangible where they think they are getting a good deal. We'll see. Be well all.