A few months ago, I was traveling in the neighborhood of my grandparents' old house. It sits on the banks of the Nanticoke River in southern Delaware and was the place of vacations when my brother and I were young.

My grandparents moved there after my grandfather retired as an anesthesiologist in upstate New York. They were simple folk and didn't want anything larger than they needed. They both loved the water, so with the river in the back yard and the ocean less than an hour away, this place was perfect.

It was a nine-hour drive from our house to theirs, so we didn't visit very often - maybe once a year - but the place was so special and magical that the trip was akin to a pilgrimage to a holy place.

The many memories of their house have faded over the years into short video clips, muffled sound bytes, and out-of-focus still shots. My cousins, my brother, and I sitting on the living room floor in a semi-circle around my grandmother's chair as she read to us. Learning to paddle on the river in their old Grumman aluminum canoe. Fishing for pike from the dock in the dwindling summer daylight. Telling ghost stories with my cousins in the spare bedroom in the attic where we slept.

I was in my mid-teens when my grandfather suffered a fatal heart attack. My grandmother stayed there another year, and then decided to move closer to her family. She scattered my grandfather's ashes on his beloved rose garden he spent his last years tending beside their house and got in the car and we drove away. It was the last time I saw the house.

During my trip, I decided to make a short detour to their old house - another pilgrimage back to the Mecca of my youth. Thirty years have passed since I last visited. My grandmother has since died, as has my father and one of his three brothers. The two remaining brothers live far away, now. My own brother has died, as well, and the cousins have since fled to distant parts of the country. A lot has changed since the last time I was there.

I wasn't sure who lived there, now, but hoped they might invite me in to share my memories of the place. I also hoped that the cued recall of being present in the place where the many forgotten memories were born might bring them flooding back.

As I nosed the car into town, the memories began returning. I passed the old stone Methodist church where we used to go on Sundays with my grandparents. I passed the grocery store where the aging clerk always gave us freebie candy. I passed the country club where we celebrated my grandparents' fiftieth wedding anniversary. All brought back memories I'd lost.

I passed through town and down the lonely road - now built up with a middle school and several businesses - and turned onto their road. Anticipation built as I rounded the final left-hand bend in the road to their house.

I don't know what happened to their house after I last saw it. I don't know who bought it, or anything about them. Perhaps the new owner died and no one was left to care for the house. Maybe they had to move, couldn't sell it, and simply decided to abandon it. Whatever the case, I'll probably never find out, and I'm not sure I care to know.

The feral house I found after I rounded that last bend was but a faint shadow of the place I had known. The well-tended lawn where my brother and I used to play was gone, and in its place were scrub brush, fallen tree limbs, and various debris. The windows from which I once looked out over the fields across the street have been broken out and boarded. I peered inside and the rooms were empty, save for a few dusty items left behind when someone moved out - a nondescript men's shoe, an empty box, some miscellaneous papers spread around on the floor.

I walked around the house and discovered that the dock, with the exception of a few rotting wooden remnants, is gone. The deck where we spent so much time catching up with relatives and swatting mosquitos was now so rickety as to be unsafe. Rabid vines climbed the back of the house and into windows.

The back door was open a few inches and I shouldered it wide enough to enter, but thought better about it when I saw that the floors had rotted and were likely not strong enough to support me.

I had taken my camera with me, intent on sharing the nostalgia via e-mail with my distant cousins. I took a photo when I first got out of my car, but couldn't bear to take more. The dilapidation was too much; taking more photos seemed a sort of desecration of holy ground. I was happy to let those few remaining still shots in my memory suffice.

Having seen enough, I fought my way back to my car around the other side of the house and found one thing that had remained all those long years. It was the only other photo I took that day.

Sir Isaac Newton's First Law, the Law of Inertia, states, "Stuff stays where you put it unless somebody comes along and moves it, and stuff that's moving keeps moving unless somebody stops it." Or something like that.

Blogging is a lot like that.

I used to be prolific. When I first started, it was so novel that I posted every day, sometimes more than once. It was a new toy and I wanted to play.

Then things popped up here and there and I missed a day or two, and I realized that, aside from some mildly unpleasant side effects, there were few consequences of a day without a blog post. Then it got easier to miss a couple of days at a time.

By the time I killed my first blog and it was reincarnated in a new form, I was posting every few days, sometimes as little as once a week. Then it became a handful of posts per month. Then, when my brother fell ill and I was away for a couple of months, I didn't post at all. And I intended to get back to it when I returned, but didn't. I was the Newtonian body at rest and couldn't get the kick-start I needed to get moving again.

I had the best of intentions. I even created a new blog template, refined it a bit, added a few nice touches and get it uploaded. Then I decided I didn't like it and uploaded the old one.

Still, though, I didn't post.

But now, I'm posting again. 'Bout time, huh? Somebody came along and gave me the kick-start I needed.

More on that later.