Yesterday I had occasion to look back at a bunch of old pictures from twenty years ago, trying to find a particular photo I remembered. I was struck by how much my life has followed the patterns I adopted in that period of adulthood. In my early twenties and teenage years I lived at home and went to school, and my father set the rhythm of our lives. By my mid-twenties, however, I had moved out and begun to explore things; I moved to Savannah in pursuit of a woman, married her, we went to grad school (her in fine arts, myself in history) and then moved to China and had adventures. After I returned, though, we settled down into a life that is recognizably similar to that which came afterwards.
This is true in spite of the fact that many major changes happened in the subsequent period. We had our son, I went to war (three times, once as a correspondent for the Long War Journal to the Special Operations Task Force - Philippines, and then twice to Iraq as a participant in the conflict). We moved many times, shifted from renting to owning a home, sold homes and moved twice more. I sought and obtained a doctorate in philosophy. I published books and many essays. My father died, I took up firefighting and wilderness rescue, I learned to ride a horse and rode almost every day for more than a year, I learned to ride motorcycles and still ride every day or nearly so.
Yet I see a clear picture of life in the pictures of me standing beside stacks of firewood, the pictures of me working on various trucks, and the pictures of me hiking or camping in the wilderness. Mostly the cold months have been heated with firewood, which is a rhythm of its own. We are a little behind this year due to a minor injury that kept me from starting for a couple of months. I prefer when wood is cut and split in the spring, cured through the summer and early autumn, and ready to warm you by Christmas. This year I am still splitting in August, though some of it has been split since May. For about a quarter of each year one is bucking wood some days and splitting on others. Today my now-adult son and I split some fine straight-grained red oak, and it will burn beautifully in the cold months.
The trucks always need work, too; it's always one thing or another. Today I intend to change the coil pack on my Jeep, which still has a cylinder that is firing improperly in spite of new plugs and plug wires. My Ford is having powertrain issues that are computer- and sensor-related. I can diagnose those with an OBD-II cord and my laptop, which is new. I've changed two tires in the last few weeks, oil and filters also.
And always there are the mountains, which with one exception our moves have kept us as close to as possible. Now we are right up among them. The air is clean and the people are fewer. Wild animals make better neighbors, both because they are less offensive and because you can always eat them if they ever do become a problem.
3 comments:
The simple things bring the mightiest pleasures. For me, the key is to recognize their importance in real time, savor them, treasure the memories.
A good life!
I do think we don't realize at the time (early adulthood, early parentage) just how much precedent we set, both for ourselves and our offspring. I may not have set all the best precedents, I suppose, where you seem to have established good, solid precedents. It's an impressive summary you lay out, and you should be proud of it.
I saw someone say once that "I am at that stage in my life where it seems every problem requires me to deal with it". And of course the list of things needing attention seems Sisyphean and eternal, no matter what I Do. I do sense, as my own children reach or approach adulthood, that I will start to be less and less required for problems, and I suppose then I'll miss it, ironically enough. I try to remember that when I sometimes feel overwhelmed.
At any rate, there's work to do!
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