As mentioned in a previous post, I now have a son in middle school. The transition has been difficult; he feels crushed under the heavier workload and he cannot quite juggle all the new expectations thrown his way. My husband and I have been helping him adjust, and all 3 of us finally begin to see improvement. The consequence, though, is that we have not spent as much time on our other priorities, such as blogging.
Last week began a new quarter, however. My son is making progress. He's had an abrupt shift in the way he looks at the world and at himself, and it has been a struggle for him to deal with it, but I think he's going to be stronger for it in the end.
So where does this leave the blog? Well, I have several drafts in the queue which I hope to publish in the next few weeks as my son continues to master his study habits. These drafts include notes on articles I read, classes I taught, and museum exhibits I toured. Meantime, I will end this post with a bit of etymology I picked up while learning about the Anglo-Saxon economic system:
The term for a particular class of peasant working on a manor farm was gebur. A gebur was a freeman, so he could not be sold to another person. His services could, however, be transferred with the property worked if that property was sold. The gebur who lived close-by to an individual was called the individual's near-gebur, in old english neah-gebur, in modern english neighbor.