that little voice

My sister is looking back at our lives in the 40s and 50s and recalling incidents, family stories, and various memories she is putting to paper.

The exercise has been a poke in my remembrance ribs, allowing me to contemplate those first 18 years of my life. My journey started 78 years ago, she joined me the following year, so our memories run along parallel tracks, but often differ in the angle we saw happenings.

As I have thought about those first years, and the decades since then, I have asked myself, what was the most important year in my life?

Was it the year we moved from Oklahoma to the Texas Panhandle ushering me into my teens?

Or my senior year in high school when I was shipped off to a southern girls school leaving behind friends, family and anticipated glory?

Maybe it was my last semester in college when for the first time I refused to follow a demand from Mother to quit college so I could run the family newspaper, a chore she didn’t want to undertake.

The most important year may have been when I married, a man with four teenagers changing my views on parenting, cooking, privacy, and teenagers.

It could have been the year I realized alcohol abuse had been a part of my life from birth and decided I needed a 12-step program to help me understand how it had impacted my life.

Or how about four years later when as a newlywed my husband and I spent a year in Australia and New Zealand just ‘being’ and not ‘doing’.

Maybe it was our move from Los Angeles to a rural community in south central Texas losing the anonymity we had experienced in the big city.

Oh, but wait, the most important year had to be the one when my mother, my father and my husband all died, dividing my life between before and after.

Or, the decision to move to Mexico bidding adios to a life I knew and saying “hola” to a new country, new friends, and new experiences.

As I gaze over the rocky roads, I have journeyed I recognize there is no one year that shaped my life, no one event, no one person, no one career move. Like each of us, my life has been woven with multicolored threads, each leading to a new place, a new thought, a new adventure, a new perspective, a new layer that when stitched together makes me who I am today.

I guess every year has been the most important, each day has been the apex, each minute the best, each breath the finest.

And I found this out because of a pandemic that may be the most important in all our lives.