Who Are These People?

  There is a section on Blogspot called "Stats". It shows how many times my column has been looked at, how many times each post has been looked at and where my audience is. I like to look at the stats once in awhile. It's interesting to see what posts have been looked at.
  I'm a little nervous about looking at the stats. (Me nervous? Go figure.) I don't want to be one of these people who gets depressed if I see that no one is looking or reading what I write. I don't check it often for just that reason.
   Sometimes I'm surprised at what I see when I check the stats. For instance,the column with the most page views is one I wrote almost three years ago. The second one after that is a column I wrote about my favourite hymn. The biggest surprise is when I look at the audience statistics.
  Most of the people who read my column are in the United States which I would expect. The surprise is that there are people in other countries who have read what I wrote. (Or at least looked at it.) The next three places where my column has been read are Russia,Germany and Latvia. I have people who have looked at my page from the United Kingdom,the Netherlands,Canada, India, France and Brazil.
   This is amazing to me. I do have distant relatives in Germany, but they don't know I write this column. I don't know anybody in Russia or Latvia. No one I know travels to either of these places  so these page views can't be from people that I know. The same goes for all the other locations.
  I wonder who these people are. How did they find my column? If you type in 'Sophie Story' there are at least a dozen different blogs with that name. Is there someone out there that bookmarks it and reads it every week?
  What kind of life do these people have? Do they live in a big city? What kind of work do they do? Are they students? Are they my age? Maybe they are all of the above.
  I never expected that anyone outside of the area where I live would read what I write. I look at the other blogs. They have pictures and links and all kinds of things. I decided not to do that because I wanted the focus to be on the writing. I want my readers to be able to picture what I write in their heads. It never occurred to me that someone sitting in Russia would be reading what I write.
  I wonder what someone living so far away would think of what I write. I hear on the news about what other countries think of the United States, but that's what politicians, leaders and the media think. That might not be the perception of someone sitting in a coffee shop on a laptop in France, Spain or the Ukraine. (Yes, last month's stats show page views from those countries.) Is my life a little bit like theirs?
   It's interesting to think about this. Why would someone from Latvia read what I write? Are they curious about what life is like for an average person in the United States? Do they like reading about the adventures of Colby and Scamp? Maybe I've written about something that they can relate to. Maybe they are surprised to find out that there is someone in the United States that doesn't watch "reality" shows and isn't obsessed with celebrities. Maybe I'm a little bit like them.
   Isn't that a neat thing to think about? Maybe someone out there reads this because they see someone who is a little like them. Someone who leads a similar kind of life only someplace else. Perhaps there is a woman in India who loves her husband like I love C. Maybe there's a woman in the Netherlands who celebrated a child finishing school as we did with Carrie. There could be someone in Germany who realises that I'm like her. Maybe I'm showing someone that we are not so different after all.....