Playing for Time

Daily Prompt: Buffalo Nickel        February 24, 2013
Dig through your couch cushions, your purse, or the floor of your car and look at the year printed on the first coin you find.  What were you doing that year?

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Since I’ve never been so lucky as to find money in a couch or on the floor of my car, I pulled a penny out of my billfold and checked the date — 1979.  Total recall would be handy … but what I know for sure is that my son was nine years old, we were living on our farm, and I was ten years into what was intended to be my first and only marriage.

The farm was miles from any town and there were no neighbors my age, so I remember perpetually wishing for girlfriends to spend time with.  I was lonely out there most of the time, but I stayed busy cooking, cleaning, doing laundry … school activities with John … feeding cattle … bottle-feeding baby calves … some part-time employment … and later on, driving tractors and combines.  And reading.  Always, always reading.

The years that preceded and followed 1979 helped to cement independence, self-sufficiency, patience, and a whole lot of other things into my nature, all of which I was able to tap into when my husband was killed in a harvest accident in 2003.  Looking back from that vantage point, 1979 seems like a very simple time with no problems whatsoever.  And little true loneliness.

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