Issue 17.14
My wife and I have lived in our home in Hurricane for about twelve years and we loved everything about living there. We liked the climate, we had wonderful neighbors and we enjoyed visiting and eating lunch at the Hurricane Seniors Center.
Where we lived, we had access to the swimming pool located only one half block from our house. Everyday I swam my 30 or 40 laps to keep in shape and then after swimming, I would play pool with the guys and gals at the club house. We had apricot, peach and Pomegranate trees and in our backyard, we grew four varieties of grapes. We lived in the midst of superb scenery. I have many times stated that the ideal place to live is in a small town that is near to a larger city to have access to the good things that a city has to offer. That is the description of where we lived to a tee. Eloise and I are now eighty-nine years old and in good health. We both had a couple of bad months and it alarmed our children. Our four daughters and our doctor thought we should now live closer to family so we came to live in Sandy, Utah figuratively kicking and screaming. We live in an independent living facility where they do all of the cooking and house work. It took some getting used to living like this but now we love it.
While here, we get many family visitors and also old friends stop to see us.
One Saturday we received a great surprise. Pete and Barbara (the editors of this Senior Sampler weekly paper that I write for stopped to visit us. During our lunch together, Pete said to me “You used to be a few weeks ahead and now you have slowed down”. Is there a problem?” I told Pete that I am running out of personal happenings to write about. He told me that he knows that I have had a very interesting life and he suggested that I write about some of those things. That was good advice so I am now writing about things close to my childhood and adult life. I may still slip a World War Two story in once in a while.
You may think that as long as I no longer do the cooking and house work, I should have much free time to spend as I wish. That is only partly true. I am the caregiver for my sweet Eloise.
She has dementia and I do almost everything for her and I find it a privilege. It is almost a 24 hour per day assignment but I love it. This is payback time for the times for the first ten years of our marriage when she would put me back to bed, perhaps as much as ten times per night.
I thought about things that I could write about. They include about my childhood, my early life on the ranch at Lewistown, Montana, The time in Butte, Montana when both of my parents were approaching the end of their lives when I was seven years old, my life in an orphanage, my post orphanage childhood, my interesting years of marriage, raising five daughters, my work in the mile deep copper mine in butte, hunting and fishing in Montana and much more. It looks like my work is cut out for me and all I have to do is find the time to do all of this. If I didn’t like to write it would be a drudge but writing is actually a tranquilizer for me.