ANTICIPATION

The summer I had waited for through the long Arizona winter months, came in a flash somewhere near mid-May, and when I woke up this morning, it had disappeared into very late August.  It's all part of my current state of evolution in which I'm realizing that I'm not really immortal and I'm not going to accomplish all of the wonderful things I spent 60+ years believing I would.  That process has made me a bit melancholy with just a pinch of dissatisfaction thrown in.  No, on second thought, that would be a Tablespoon of dissatisfaction.  There must be hundreds of things I will never do.  For the moment, those items, unfortunately, are piled much higher than the few things I have actually managed to do, and it's making me think about the need for a Life Coach. I'm not sure I'd every heard of a Life Coach until a few months ago, but I'm thinking I might be more pulled together had one lived close by back in the day when I still had the time to make the effort worthwhile.

During the years I could have used a Life Coach, I lived on an isolated farm in southwest Kansas.  I spent my days dusting, vacuuming, cooking for six, all while harmonizing enthusiastically with Barry Manilow on vinyl.  How isolated were we really?  For starters, we had no newspaper delivery nor mail service.  The local paper was placed in our Post Office Box very late each weekday afternoon.  I picked it up the following morning after dropping my kids at their schools.  The day-old "Dodge City Daily Globe" was very little consolation to a news junkie.  That will only make sense if you remember there was no cable in the wilderness, either.

We lived a quarter mile off a secondary dirt road. To reach our house, one had to navigate a wash/gully, draw--take your pick.  If it rained, one would gun the engine just the right amount and keep driving no matter if the car cooperated or not.  The result, quite often, was to end up in a dead stop, despite the spinning tires, completely encased in mud.  If it snowed, the scenario was identical, except it was colder and we were encased in snow.  Either scenario involved ruined shoes and an endless walk to the house.  During dry times we were fine, although a bit dusty.

In retrospect, living at the farm for eleven years was the best of all worlds from time to time, and the worst of all worlds in between.  I think it helped me become independent, to a certain degree.  We had no neighbors nearby. Well, actually, there were neighbors two miles north of us.  She was younger than I, gave birth at home, baked her own bread, and raised chickens.  We had very little in common.  After our Australian Sheep Dog (Bo-Peep) ventured to her house for a short visit, taking out a few of her chickens in the process, we were left with nothing in common.  Bo Peep was a wonderful dog--high strung with a tendency toward testiness--but the best baby-sitter since "Nana" of Peter Pan fame.  My youngest child (usually naked) wandered the fields for hours with Bo-Peep at his side.  I could trust that she would protect him with every fiber of her being and he would be fine.  She did and he was.

I also learned about cattle--steers, to be exact.  They are incredibly non-intelligent.  (I hate the word stupid even when it fits.)  When placed on wheat pasture, they will immediately walk the fence line of the field and, if it's electrified, bounce off the wires again and again and again.  But, a week later, if the electrified fence is removed for some strange reason, they will stay in the field, walking up to, then stopping just short of where the fence had run. Even though that's true, don't take your fence down.  If something should frighten your cattle, they will forget everything else, run through fences (real or imaginary) and over each other in their need to do something...anything.  There are sad stories of mass suffocations of cattle during blizzards that I don't even want to mention.

In addition a steer will stand in a foot of snow that is temporarily covering five or six inches of lush green wheat and starve to death.  A horse nearby will immediately clear away the snow with its hoof and feast for hours.  The steer will continue to stand and watch the horse with a heart-breaking expression that only a steer can manage.  I used to theorize that hell had absolutely nothing to do with fire and brimstone.  Real hell was being re-incarnated as a steer on wheat pasture during a western Kansas winter.  I still believe that theory has merit.

I think I left my Life Coach a few paragraphs back (sorry) and, perhaps, am beginning to realize that even though my life is not the story I set out to tell, it's the only one I have and, surprisingly, may have an unexpected and under-appreciated achievement or two buried within.  I may need to do this exercise by myself a few more times until I find just the right Life Coach and learn to accept who, what, where and why I am, what to do about it, and how to make it better.  That makes me think of the Dove Bar (dark chocolate and sea salt caramel) wrapper I opened today:  "Feed your sense of anticipation", it read.  I like that.  I think I'll do it.