While I am there I intend to cross off several of the remaining things from my list of 60 things to do before I turn 60 this year. With any amount of good fortune at all, I should be able to take care of 5 of them during my brief stay.
#3~to design my own grave marker, complete with a peace symbol
There is a place in Hutchinson that handles that kind of thing and I've come up with a pretty simple idea for my own "ID" that will mark my final resting place. I think it will look pretty much like me and that's what I was aiming for. I hope to not even need it for many years to come but it will be good to have it made, paid for, and even laid in place at the old Quaker cemetery in rural Harvey County so that my family would not even need to worry about it when that time comes.
#14-to walk across the swinging bridge at the Harvey County West Park
Some happy memories were made there when I was a very little girl. It was like our own personal playground and very near the farm that my parents were living on when I was born. Although we moved away from that area when I was 8, we still went back from time to time and had a picnic or two there. The swinging bridge was so fun to play on and there was no limit as to how many times you could run across it. When I grew up and had children of my own I took them there as well. Looking at their faces as they smiled and laughed while they skipped across those old wooden planks was like looking at my own face when I was their age.
#30-Go back and walk through the Laurel Cemetery near my hometown of Haven. Spend some time there amongst the graves of people who meant so much to me when I was a kid there growing up.
Some very wonderful people have been laid to rest in that cemetery and as often as I can, I make a journey there to pay my respects to them. Although it is a fairly large graveyard, I lived around the area long enough to know about a good share of those who are there. Although going to cemeteries is not high on the list of some folks (and I respect those that don't care to) I have always found a degree of peace by doing so myself. As a child I was taught to respect, honor and remember the dead.
#32-to write a letter to someone. Really write it. You know, with a pen and a stamp?
Long before email and the days of instant messaging, people used this thing called a "stamp" to converse back and forth with their friends and family. It was a unique idea and one that lasted several years. Although it took a day or two or even five to get to where it was being sent, people still managed to use it as a form of successful communication. My very first remembrance of sending a letter to someone was when I was a 5th grader back in Haven, Kansas. My brother had been drafted into the Army that year and right before he was sent off for his tour of duty in Vietnam, I wrote him a letter and bought my very own 6 cent stamp to mail it with. It was postmarked from Haven and I'll never forget the moment I affixed the stamp to my envelope and slipped it into the slot for outgoing mail. I thought of someone who has been a special friend to me back there in that little Reno County town and that person will be the recipient of this form of now considered "old fashioned" correspondence.
#35-downsize, downsize, downsize
I've been working on this one and will be taking back a load of things that have found their place and time to pass on to others. It feels good to hand off some of life's accumulations to someone else. Really good as a matter of fact. This "traveling light" idea is more and more appealing to me each and every day that passes by.
It is time for this day to begin and soon I will be with "the 21". The remaining weeks that we have together are passing way too fast and I really do have to stop and pause to think about what is most important for us yet to learn. The time that I get with them each day will never be given back to me to do over again. There's lots of reading, writing and math that awaits us but there is one other thing that I always consider to be of equal importance. It's the kind of learning that is usually never planned and always seems to arrive at just the right moment.
Life's lessons.
There are plenty.
They never lose their importance.
I never seem to run out of them.
I hope that I never will.
Back home in Haven, Kansas with three wonderful friends from the "land of long ago and far, far away". Fall Festival 2012
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