Once upon a time there was a remarkable place called Rain and Clouds. It existed in a mysterious realm called Yahoo Groups.This land existed before blogs and personal websites, before Facebook and all the modern social media came to dominate the web. In that farway place Carla first began to share her story from the pain of her early transition to the mixed bag of her post-transition life.

Alas the powerful beings who are gods over the web created more effective ways to connect folks and at the same time capture eyeballs and hearts and brains from which they could profit. Thus Yahoo Groups was sent to that place where obsolete things go to die. And with it when Rain and Clouds.

After that Rain and Clouds lived on in a few places but never recovered from the death of Yahoo Groups. It quietly died and was respectfully buried.

The reason for its death is that I stopped writing. The reason I stopped writing is twofold.

First I became too busy to write. I took a new job that dominated my evenings. Evening was my writing time. In short the coming of the job was accompanied by the going of my journaling time.

The reason was the nature of the new job. In 2012 I had my “15 minutes of fame.” Why? I had made a brief address on the floor of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church expressing why the church should add gender identity and expression to its constitution’s nondiscrimination article. The action was covered by religious news watchers and then the story was picked up by AP.

That evening the executive assistant to my bishop emailed me to say requests for information about me were coming in from all over. As I went to blog about the day, I ended up watching the number of hits on Rain and Clouds climb from 10 to 1100. It dawned on me that all kinds of people were now reading my personal thoughts and experiences. Over the next few days I made the decision to make Rain and Clouds private. Not long after, I decided to close the group for good.

I tried to re-boot Rain and Clouds but this time without sharing my private thoughts and experiences. It was not the same. As a priest it was inappropriate for me to share my private thoughts and experiences the way I did in the past. The days of Rain and Clouds were over.

It’s been years since the end of Rain and Clouds. Now I feel a new need to write. However this time it’s about where I am in this stage of life. This new journal is about aging. I’ll write about health, vocation, family, spirituality, and new interests as my life moves toward an important change. In short this blog is about what it means to be an old black transwoman.

So welcome to Partly Cloudy, the successor of Rain and Clouds.