Blog for August 15, 2022
I love that song, because I get it, because I’m getting older. My kids are grown and in fact a whole bunch of grandkids are grown too. In a twinkling of an eye. Besides the kids, there is family, friends, and all kinds of people we have known and loved that have moved on or passed on.
Those relationships seem forever when you are in the middle of it. My job/s seemed to last forever. People come and people go, jobs come and go, babies come and grow up and move on. It can be a bit painful.
My husband and I are on a long road trip, pretty much checking out middle America. Going to some states I’ve never been. We’ve traveled many miles of country back roads, one lane highways, and have seen thousands of miles of farms. My favorite was the Sunflower farms through South and North Dakota. Beautiful.
But they are working hard and growing all kinds of crops, lots of corn, which I love. They seem to go on for miles and miles, forever. But now that it is all behind us, in a blink of an eye, we’re in different types of landscapes.
As we drive those little one lane country roads we come to tiny little towns from time to time. Few and far between I tell ya, but if you blink, you will miss the whole town. Once in a great while there is a bigger town, like Guymon Oklahoma, where we stopped at a McDonalds so I could use the Wi-Fi, thank goodness for Mc’D’s. lol, I’ve gone to them all over the world. Well, a lot of places let’s say.
Anyway, these little blink of an eye towns seem to me to be what made America great, and still does. There are “Co-Ops” in almost all of them for the local farmers and they all have a small store and a little church. Maybe a gas station and now days, they all have a “Dollar Store”. Ha!
Even with a Dollar Store there, if you blink, you’ll miss the whole town. They are small, but they are important. I had made a stupid comment to my husband when driving through some part of North Dakota about so much wasted land, he said,
“None of this land is wasted, they utilize all of it for the betterment of their lives and ours”. Their farms serve the whole of the USA. Wow! What was I thinking?
As I thought about these small rural areas and what looked like empty land to me, I thought of how we, my husband and I are approaching the end of our lives and I think of all the kids and grandkids we have raised and been a part of their lives.
We stopped in one little Oklahoma town and visited an old friend of thirty years who moved there about a year ago. I sure do love her and miss her; she has been a big part of my recovery. I cried when we left, like leaving a sister. The visit with her made me remember how important maintaining these valued relationships are and how much they mean to me. I have known her ever since she got clean and we have been through so much together, but it seems like yesterday and yet, her kids that we took camping when they were little are now in their thirties, don’t blink.
Our trip is not over, but we are kinda headed home and I have very mixed feelings about it all. When we get home, it’ll be our first year in a long, long time with no kid to get ready for school and take to practice, youth groups, games, cousins. It will be different, empty, mixed with sadness and longing, tons of memories. Memories that I would never have had if not for recovery. So, I’m mixed with a lot of gratitude as well as longing.
People tell us this will be good for us, and I see what they are saying, my husband and I got together with children, we’ve always had kids about us, so this will be so different. I look forward to it being just him and I, hey that was one of our wedding songs, “Just you and I”. Well, finally, here we are, just you and I my love, I hope we don’t blink through this last part of our lives together. I love you so much. Thank-you for forty+ years of loving and without our thirty-seven years of recovery I know it wouldn’t have been possible. So, I’m thankful and grateful and sad and happy and re-adjusting. Don’t Blink.
Question of the Week: Are there times of your life that went by too quickly?
