“I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very very like me from my heels up to my head,
And I see him jump before me when I jump into my bed.”
******* (Robert Louis Stevenson: “A Child’s Garden of Verses”)
I have a shadow on the Internet. It is my spouse, you know. He travels the ether, following in my wake, reading posts that I have read, reading comments that I have made and responses to them. He is one of the first people to read my posts, and proofreads them for me before I post sometimes.
We also share an email address. I know in this modern day of Yahoo and Gmail that it is a rare thing for two people to utilize the same email address. We started using email back in the Dark Ages of the internet when the vast majority of people we knew not only didn’t know what it was, they didn’t even have a computer. Since we were looking at this new technology from the viewpoint of people who lived in the same house and had used the same mailing address for years, it didn’t seem necessary to create separate addresses on the electronic abode.
I suppose this seems rather lacking in privacy to some people, but after you have been married for twenty-some-odd years, privacy is a commodity that seems rather superfluous, extraneous even. I mean, after you have been awakened by the scent of a wee-hours flatulence episode accompanied by wild sheet flapping, privacy seems lost, somehow.
We have an agreement around the holidays and any other “Present giving” time. If we order something on line, we will tell the other that any emails received from XYZ Corporation are none of their business. That way shipping information and order confirmations do not compromise the secrecy of gifts. Other secrecies in our relationship seem unnecessary, even detrimental.
So anyway, if you look at your blog stats and it seems like Healingmagichands is visiting a lot more times a day than seems logical or even expedient, you are probably seeing my shadow’s visits, flitting by and resting there gently, before he wafts on to the next place.
the havens 