Life by the Decade

          70 years ago this month I was living comfortably in Colorado Springs inside a nice warm and comfortable womb, freshly conceived by my mother and father and without a care in the world. My father however was training for artillery duty which led him away from mom and on to England and then into Germany.

         60 years ago I was in the fourth grade, being herded about by a nun whose name escapes me. Looking back on my grade-school days, I feel like they were all frustrated women for reasons I will never know for sure. One thing I do know and remember, they liked the girls and barely tolerated the boys in class. One event in particular I remember I was in competition for the spelling bee. The class was whittled down to me and one of the girls. The nun selected words for us to spell. The girl was getting words like ‘look’ ‘run’ ‘see’ while I was getting words like ‘navigation’ and ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ and as you may guess I lost the competition in class and she lost her first competition at the next level.

          50 years ago I was in Hawaii, training on navigational and radio equipment compliments of my Uncle  Sam. Duty was light, with weekends off for snorkeling in the clear warm waters surrounding us there. There was a lot to enjoy there, if one had money to spend, which I did not, but bus rides were half-dollar and a bunk overnight at the army recreation center on the beach was another half-dollar, so I didn’t feel totally deprived.

         40 years ago I was living in Missouri, experiencing my first real winter in years. I had an old Dodge truck with a giant Hemi engine that was so heavy it left the back end so light that it was useless in any slick situation. That year we had a lot of slick situations.

         30 years ago I was living large in California with a fancy town house, heated pool and Jacuzzi, living on drinks mixed with Kahlua and cream and making regular trips to Las Vegas. I was making money in the booming stock market and things were looking up for us.

          20 years ago this month we were settled in here on the farm raising calves, sheep, goats and chickens, along with keeping an acre-sized garden.

         10 years ago I was working my tail off, trying to hold on to a job and support us during a rough time. Things have a habit of changing.

         Today we are into our first snow storm of the season, listening to Ella Fitzgerald’s album “Wishing You a Swinging Christmas” while decorating our Christmas trees. Outside my window the Black Angus cows across the road have their backs and necks piling up with snow as they graze along apparently hardly aware of how cold it is outside. There are still a lot of leaves on the elm trees, making them look more like Christmas trees than elms. I am hoping that they don’t start dropping branches as the snow continues to stick to them, adding ever more weight to their brittle branches.

          10 years from now I have no idea where I might be or if I will even know who I am or where I am.