Did you ever just stop and think, "Where did the time go? When did this happen? I am old!" I did that today. I realized that I am no longer young! I did not feel old this morning when I got up, but suddenly came the dawning of the realization that there will be no going back, no second chance at a first anything. This is it and it is down hill from here to the end. From the cradle to the grave sort of thing.
It seems like only yesterday, I was a little barefooted kid running the streets in Nickerson, Kansas without a care in the world. I do not remember being cold, but I don't remember being warm. I do not remember being hungry, but i don't remember being full, either. I went to school and apparently I learned something. I remember babysitting to buy my mother a stainless steel mixing bowl because I had broken her glass one. I remember clod fights, kick the can, watching the calf die, and eating green peaches. I remember Howard Fein poking his false teeth out at me and scaring me half to death. I remember many things, but I don't remember getting older.
I remember having babies, catching fish, and getting divorced. I remember burying my brother, sister, father, mother, friends, husband, and pets. I remember tears and laughter, good times and bad times, having money and being broke, but for the life of me, I can not remember growing old. It just seems like one day I was young and the next day I was not. The body that used to jump the fence, run a mile, dance to the twist, and unload 50 pound bags of feed, just quit cooperating. The mind that was so quick with a comeback has slowed to a crawl. Now the body seeks creature comforts of warmth and a soft bed. The mind likes to drift back to another day and time. Back to when the kids were babies and all I needed to be happy was a roof over my head, food in my belly and hope for tomorrow.
Now my life stretches before me like a long black, endless ribbon of a highway with no beginning and no end. Do all people face this mortality? What a waste! We start out as helpless little babies needing someone to care for us and move through a maze called life to end up as helpless old people needing someone to care for us. Oh, the irony of it all!
I wish I had it all to do over! If I could have another chance I would seize each day and savor it from dawn to dark. I would examine every minute of every day and write each night in my journal and plan every tomorrow so that every day would be important to me and to everyone I knew. I would hold my mother tight. I would sing to my brother. I would rock my children. I would have been a missionary to the poorest of the poor and the sickest of the sick. I would not have shed selfish tears for myself, but would have wept for the world and would have made it a better place instead of just drifting through in my own willful way.
But, alas, I can change nothing. I set here a lonely old woman with my delusions of grandeur, and wish it were different. But all my wishing changes nothing. I just hope that when I get up to the pearly gates I can remember the one quote that fits this situation: "Of all the things, of mice and men, the greatest of all, What might have been." Or something along that line.
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