After the 10th anniversary of my 29th birthday a revelation came to me that I was no longer bullet proof. I was going to die someday…me. It seemed everything always happened to everyone else and I was untouched. One day my son died, another day there was a most terrible divorce and then my life changed from living with our family of six to being alone. Where had the years gone to?
Today the trendy saying is “back in the day”. I love that and the way things used to be. When I was 13, I used to walk by myself to Horace Mann Junior High School in Lakewood Ohio to the Friday night dances. My mother never was afraid of me walking home in the dark….Today it’s a struggle to dance as health issues follow me out to the floor.
This nostalgia has me in a funk. Yep, I’m sorting through everything in every room in the house tossing some things in bags for DAV, and many items to be posted on St. Joe Swap N Shop. The cat fan is broken, needs a new electric motor and it makes no sense in it being here! The games are like new and have taken up space for the last 20 years and are never used. This summer I helped 2 Too (Billie Girl) put her wedding dress in a glass case for preservation for a future generation….my mother saved her parachute gown she bought in Frankfort Germany to wed my GI Dad, not to be worn by me, but 36 years later to be worn by my #1 daughter (Connie) at Maranatha Academy for a mother-daughter night where the girls paraded down a runway modeling their mother’s dresses.
I am going through all my paperwork in my life, filing, throwing away, setting aside. No one will care about most of this when I am gone, will not even understand why I kept this or that….a front page St. Joseph News article I kept on a flood in Agency, a picture showing my friend’s home in ruins, Harvey wearing a gun on his belt because of snakes, going about with his family salvaging their possessions. I went there to give help. A moment in my life to remember……It went in the trash. It is meaningless to anyone but me.
Always dreamed of being a writer, but like other projects, nothing ever came of that…EXCEPT I forgot that I journaled quite a bit throughout the years, forgot that I wrote my life story, wrote and wrote about the dark days of my divorce, wrote all the 16 years of my struggles as a single, not to mention over a dozen country songs I wrote along the way. My goodness, there is a lot to read for future generations of those who care to be entertained by old stories.
And then there were all the pictures I had blown up to put together in an upcoming coffee table book because I had plans to become a famous photographer…….
Just trying to simplify my life. It’s time to clean out all the junk, sell unwanted pieces, do my fall cleaning….get ready for winter. Garage sales will resume next April……and that is NOT a dog….it is a white Bengal Tiger ! ! !
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