One Year Ago..

It is so hard to believe that just one year ago we shut the doors on the business in Sumner. The ‘official’ day was December 10th and even though I did think about it this weekend, to be honest I didn’t think about it too long. Then today I had to resubmit all my information to the unemployment website (because after a year I was told that you have to put it all back in again) Well, I couldn’t remember some of the basic things of the place where I used to work – address… phone numbers…. and so I went to get my planner that I knew that had everything in it that I was looking for. When I opened it up to get the information, it was really weird. Honestly it was like looking at something that belonged to someone else and that person no longer was around. See, I told you that it was weird. The paperwork that was in it sure brought back memories.  There were phone numbers of most everyone I knew, old photo’s of our kids, a Christmas card from my nephew before they had their last baby, a letter that Kyle wrote about 12 years ago when we went on vacation, and lists of birthdays and addresses, just to name some of the stuff.  After 30 years, you can accumulate a lot of treasures. I wasn’t sure how to react when I was looking at it. Part of me was kind of sad and part of me was really OK with it. Even though December was when we closed the plant, it looks like the last of the entries on the daily planner pages was done in June. I know that after June, we spent most of the rest of the time traveling so that would make sense. I had no idea what I would do when we closed the doors back in December of 2010. And if you are ever in this situation you will find out that just about everyone will give you ideas on what they think that you should do. Some of the people that give you advice are people that you know and some of them are people that you don’t know. But really I’m not real clear on what I want to do with the rest of my life yet. There is one thing that I did find out this past year. I found out that there are much more important things in my life right now than planners and schedules. I am so grateful to have the time off to help fix up the farm and to do some of the things that I didn’t take the time to do in the past. I don’t know what the next year will bring, but whatever it is I know that I will be ready. So I guess we’ll all have to just wait and see what happens in 2012!