Following is the location link to Hess Family Blog, A Year on Monona. The entry below is the first for this blog and also found on new site.


http://ayearonmonona.blogspot.com

A Year on Monona

"Life had changed, and the masons had changed it.  If we got up at 6:30 we could have breakfast in peace.  any later, and the sound effects from the kitchen made conversation impossible. One morning when the drills and hammers were in full swing, I could see my wife's lips move, but no words were reaching me. Eventually she passed me a note: Drink your coffee before it gets dirty." – Peter Mayle, from A Year in Provence










To write a family blog that would take its inspiration from an English couple who finally decided to take the great leap from London to Provence, first there must be someplace to land the blog, a home, in this case on Monona, to even begin.  Unlike the weather beaten couple from Peter Mayle's book, this time around anyway, we have been mostly able to avoid the sawdust in the coffee, and yet the sawdust is still there as the main bathroom in our new home in Madison is being completely gutted and new basement constructed....with us yet having moved in.  We picture great diligence on the part

of this Madison crew, tearing and hammering away as we think to ourselves back here in Onalaska that great strides are being made, just like the great and efficient strides made here back at home at our new condominium on the back bay of the Black River.  Unlike Mayle's classic, this blog entry can't be, by its very nature, a well-conceived story, but more of an attempt at offering impressions of a family that has chosen to make a leap into the contours of a dream of the somewhat unknown.  It is less about a moving away from anything and more about a moving toward a five-pointed opportunity, one for each person and one as a whole family.

New experiences, such as this one, as Carly is kindly welcomed to her fifth grade class for an orientation day at Edgewood school, will naturally blend with images of old.

Rock Dam pine needle gathering

Where we hope to also blend the great humor that is ought to be had by trying new skills against the

experience of those mastered.

If we are lucky along the way, the other, older participants of the Hess family – now both firmly planted in the great unknowable years otherwise known as teenhood – might stand still enough in front of dad's camera in order to capture and verify their existence, as Abby finds her new world on the campus of UW Madison, and Julia her studies under the open sky lights at Riverside Drive.  The reader can be sure the writer of the blog will most often be found looking out onto the sun-bedecked back courtyard pondering either the next meal or the next way to entertain fifth graders on the

volleyball court.  The mother will not be far away, lifting up, as is her way, the rest of us through her sheer might of good will, decency and care.