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Written by SHARLENE MINSHALL
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Sunday, 01 January 2012 00:00 |
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New Year’s is a good time for appraisal, but I did mine in November. I celebrated a significant birthday, my 75th! I put in the exclamation point because it is significant to me. Certainly many others have reached and survived this number but it is my first time and definitely “significant!” with an exclamation point. My body understands hitting 75 and gives me the aches and pains to prove it, but my mind is having a hard time wrapping its tentacles around it. This e-mail didn’t exactly help: “To save the economy, the Immigration Department will start deporting old people to lower Social Security and Medicare costs. Old people are easier to catch, and will not remember how to get back home!”
I thought that was pretty funny until I thought about it awhile, then remembered how true the last sentence is, whether the first part ever comes true or not!
It’s a terrible thing to put your age in print; then you are labeled forever. But I feel especially blessed. I have two great daughters married to two great guys and I have two wonderful grandchildren. Everybody is healthy and happy and more importantly these days, working. Theoretically, I don’t need to worry about them anymore.
I’m in pretty good shape…as they say, “for the shape I’m in.” The biggest nuisance and dilemma is that everything has shifted. Gravity won the battle before I even realized there was a war. I gained something; nobody can say I’m “shiftless” anymore.
The two kayaking trips I did a couple of weeks ago weren’t exactly like canoeing Alaska’s Yukon River for two weeks like I did to celebrate my 60th birthday, but hey, I can still do a few things. I had fully intended to “reinvent myself” by my 75th birthday but I never did figure out “as what”! However, by next summer, I intend to publish my first novel into the e-book world so maybe six months late, I will emerge as a 75-plus “novelist.”
“E-book.” That in itself suggests some of the innumerable changes that have occurred since I was born, and in more recent years, electronically anyway, they are coming at warp speed. Of course there were other little things that happened along the way, like walking on the moon.
The Beginning
I was born in a log cabin built by an uncle and my dad from green logs from our woods. Four big brothers (from seven to 15 years older) awaited my first lusty female cry that frosty November night and never let me forget how loud it was throughout all my later years. They and the cabin are gone now, but they were my stalwart protectors through my mother’s death when I was 10 and on through my husband’s early death when I was 45.
Growing up among the huge maple trees in our front yard, I climbed to delicious heights and secret places, and played within the fuzzy, itchy rooms of my mother’s hollyhock gardens. My brothers and my father built a small playhouse with windows and window boxes where I spent many childhood hours, but of course my favorite place was climbing up over the barn wall into a secret spot of my own creation.
I occasionally visited my only playmate, a cousin who lived a mile or so up the creek.
The path took me along the Dowagiac Creek bank that ran next to our farms. It was a cold, deep, swift-running stream where I learned to swim. The other side of the trail followed the edge of our woods, where I could swing out over the lowlands on long twisty vines. Hollow trees beckoned me inside to escape or encourage whatever villains or princes lived in my thoughts. Life didn’t move all that fast in those days. Computers and iPods, e-mail, Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t surface for decades, so I played house, remained blissfully incommunicado, and my imagination took me wherever I wanted to go.
Maybe all those days alone with nothing but imagination also prepared me for a future of RVing alone to “far-away places with strange sounding names.”
Youthful Aspiration
Although I won third place in a high school writing contest, I don’t ever remember being encouraged in my writing until my husband came along. I hope he is somewhere enjoying my stories. I never had childish dreams of becoming a writer. I wanted to become an opera star. It is possible I deafened innumerable chickens, dozens of pigs, and a few cows and horses while practicing for that future day. The closest I came was being allowed into various church choirs over the years.
My children flew the coop to college and marriage, and Jack left me to cope with the world on my own. Although that was a very unhappy chapter in my life, I also grew up because I didn’t have him to lean on any more. That was when I made the decision to go on the road full time in an RV. Those twenty years of full-time RVing spoiled me forever for staying in one place; however, having said that, I realize how fortunate I was to have lived and traveled those twenty years during that time period. I think when I started, gasoline was right around a $1 a gallon and campgrounds were still reasonable. And more importantly, all those adventures gave me something to write about. All in all, I’ve had “A Wonderful Life.”
And the advice I give from my lofty perch of 75 is just what you might expect: “Keep on keepin’ on and enjoy it to the fullest!” God Bless and Happy New Year.
Autographed copies of 2009 fourth edition RVing Alaska and Canada ($19.95) and Adventures with the Silver Gypsy ($14.95) are available through author Sharlene Minshall, Box 1040, Congress, AZ 85332-1040, or at Amazon.com.
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