Life is like a big bowl. The bowl holds choices that lead down paths which go in many different directions. Every time you come to an intersection you draw another choice out of the bowl. Life as we know it is dichotomous, fluid, elastic, messy and finite. It never moves backward only onward.
I am a Baby Boomer, albeit at the tail-end of the animal as my younger siblings are Gen Xers. I have resided in more than a fifth of the states in this remarkable country. From places surrounded by land, crops, cattle, and horses where the nearest hospital was 75 miles away to large cities that swelled into more than a million; from mountains to below sea level. In all the dichotomy people were people, some shining examples of generosity and kindness, some that made life intolerable for other beings, the majority are somewhere in-between.
The normal course of growing up in a stanch patriarchal theocracy, which permeated every facet of life, dictated that women married young. The dogma was that they were expected to be fruitful, and multiply……a lot.
The first of my four children arrived a month after my first wedding anniversary. Two more followed in rapid succession. Although our quarter century mark had not been reached by the third child’s birth we were dismal failures in our social circle by those that had four or five children. Somewhere along the way I escaped or leaked out of the mold.
