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Cornucopia Road lies just outside Virginia City. This rutted gravel road begins at the pond on the west side of Virginia City, and snakes its way uphill, making numerous sharp curves and turns on its way to the top of the mountain. I would guess a traveler moving up this little hill ascends over 1000 feet in altitude from the time he or she leaves the base of the road until she reaches the top. So, Cornucopia most definitely does have a grade to it, with some portions of the road much steeper than others, but nowhere does this throughway have...
With the return of January, every publication in creation tackles the subject of New Year’s resolutions and making improvements of all sorts in one’s life. When the new year dawns bright and fresh, writers, figuring this is a good way to fill blank pages, devote a lot of space discussing how and why to make resolutions, how to keep them, tricks and hints on how to follow through on those well-meaning resolves, and a host of other spin-offs on the subject of resolutions of all sorts. Personally, I shake my head at all this hoopla, and I gen...
We humans like instant gratification and quick results. Most of us wait impatiently in line, become enraged when we need to queue up to take our turn, and chew viciously at our fingernails waiting for someone else who does not value punctuality and dares to waste our precious time. Couple this desire to see instantaneous results to a huge project that requires everything to fall neatly into place at the proper time, and a person could go insane waiting, worrying and watching. It’s times like these that a person needs to remember a few words o...
I decided that this year my husband and I would celebrate an old-fashioned Christmas. Then it hit me that this year I will see my 69th Christmas season. I don’t feel that old, I can’t remember all my previous sixty plus holiday seasons, but I celebrated them. Some years stood out as exceptional, other years lacked true Christmas spirit and festive feelings, but I did manage to see sixty-eight Yuletide seasons come and go. I obviously can qualify as an old-fashioned person in my own right. After surviving more than six decades of holiday sea...
My generation grew up writing thank you notes. Whenever we received a gift from anyone, we sat down and wrote a brief note expressing our appreciation for the item in question. Sometimes it proved difficult to thank someone for a totally inappropriate or disliked present, but nonetheless, we wrote some sort of note anyway. Our mother saw to that. In this day of texting and emails, the thank you note seems to have fallen by the wayside. Someone texts a thank you using a few unintelligible symbols that only the young people can decipher, or...
My opinion of Halloween has changed drastically through the years. I have come full circle in the process, beginning with an initial delight in the fall celebration as a child, growing to dislike the Halloween pranks as a young adult, and now as an older woman I have once again embraced this fall festival with anticipation. I enjoyed Halloween as a child. In those ancient of days communities still hosted Halloween parades and I always entered the town parade hoping my costume would win a prize....
Most people have heard of those famous, or infamous depending on whom you talk to, vigilantes that ruled the streets of Virginia City in late 1863 and early 1864. These citizens took it upon themselves to rid the town of unsavory characters and they did so with gusto, hanging at least twenty people in a six week period. These vigilantes vanished from the forefront in 1864 with the arrival of a district judge, but their legend lives on in books and tall tales. It appears that a tiny band of...
Two little old people, my husband and I, finally moved into our forever cabin. We plan to live here until we die, or until those nice young men in their clean white coats come to take us away to the home for the mentally deficient. When we first moved to Virginia City, we bought a hundred year old house. We liked that house, but we both quickly realized that we could not afford to maintain such an old home if we both wanted to retire from full time jobs anytime in the foreseeable future. It...
Tender footed me has never experienced major weather upheavals. Hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, forest fires, and other natural disasters or weather phenomena all belong in the realm of ‘they happen to someone else, far far away from here’. No longer. I can now say that I have lived through an unwanted natural geological event, even if I had no idea at the time what on earth I heard or felt. Every so often, earthquakes have a habit of jolting residents of Montana. Virginia City suffered through a major earthquake in the early fif...
I love the sun. I understand completely why the ancients worshipped this blazing disc. Giver of life, casting brightness to light our path, increasing one’s sense of well-being; John Denver hit the nail on the head. Sunshine on my shoulders DOES make me happy. Given my complete appreciation of the sun, it makes sense that solar gadgets and the idea of harnessing the sun’s power intrigues me. I own a vast array of solar powered objects, from flashlights and lanterns to reading lamps and power packs that charge small items, as well as sev...
I noticed a most stunning pair of shoes this past weekend. These shoes gleamed in the sunlight, the silver soles merged into a metallic red that glistened and flashed as the wearer of these magnificently fashionable footwear moved along the street. I took a good look at the man sporting these marvelous creations and I broke into a smile of glee. The owner of those fancy shoes has more years under his belt than I do. Footwear has certainly changed since I was a youngster. Back then, we had less than stellar shoes from which to choose. Every...
We learned in school about the hardships those who settled the west endured: no running water, leaky, drafty shacks made from sod or tar paper, working from dawn to dusk to clear the land and get the crops in, sickness, cold, shortage of food; the list goes on. Our idea of roughing it today can’t in any way compare with roughing it one hundred years ago. My husband and I are currently roughing it 21st century style. We just sold our home. We needed to sell our house in order to purchase the cabin we intend to live in by summer’s end. The cabin,...
While rushing around town the other day, hurrying as usual as I dislike shopping and want to finish up as quickly as possible, I bumped into an acquaintance I haven’t seen for several years. When she said ‘hello’ to me, I looked at her in puzzlement for a few seconds until my brain figured out who she was. I tried not to stare in dismay, as the first thought that entered my head was ‘my goodness, has she ever aged.’ My next thought, following a nanosecond after my initial shocked disbelief at seeing the gray hair and other signs of age in my...
This big, beautiful state of Montana has so much to offer with its varied geography, open country, and landscapes that leave one amazed and humbled. The terrain certainly changes as one drives from one side of the state to the other. I have had the good fortune to live in eastern Montana on the glorious prairies and in southwestern Montana among the towering mountains. If I had to choose between plains and mountains, I'm not sure I could as both ends of the state have their own special beauty...
All of us have stories to tell; the actions and antics we committed in our lives, both good and bad, naughty and nice, that help explain who we are and define us as human beings. Too often these stories remain untold and a person takes a life full of interesting but unknown anecdotes with him or her to the grave. Children and grandchildren never have the opportunity to truly know and understand their parents or grandparents without the knowledge of these little stories from the past that help explain where people came from and what they have...
I wonder where the term 'golden years' came from to describe those of us who not only have gold in our teeth and silver in our hair, but also some lead in our derrieres. From what I see to date, no gold of any sort accompanies those aches and pains and other little mishaps we oldsters seem to face more and more frequently. Case in point: about a month ago I slipped on a patch of ice in my back yard and fell splat on my back. It has taken those four plus weeks since my crash for the muscles,...
As a child, Christmas enthralled me. Every December we made so many happy memories preparing for and savoring the holiday season to the fullest. We baked cookies, some of which we hung on the tree until the year a mouse discovered the cookies and helped himself, which in itself makes me smile even now as I recall that long ago and far away Christmas. Each year I helped my dad hang the large five pointed star on the chimney, covered with strands of multicolored lights that the entire neighborhood could view and enjoy. My dad and my brother...
I've decided that Christmas truly belongs to youngsters. The eager eyes, the intense anticipation, and the sheer enchantment of the season spills out of every child's being, and adults cannot help but get drawn into the magical wonderland we call Christmas. Children love the decorating, the school concerts, and the idea of filling their homes from stem to stern with the reminders of the season. They thrive on the overall atmosphere of this special time of year that fills them with great...
Holiday seasons nowadays tend to blend together for one continuous shopping spree, starting in late September when merchants feel obligated to start pushing Halloween, and lasting right through Easter the following spring. When I was a kid, admittedly quite some time ago, this behavior on the part of shopkeepers didn’t exist and we as consumers didn’t demand it. Stores began stocking shelves with Halloween treats and costumes the first or second week of October. We didn’t even begin thinking about what we might want to wear when we went out t...
It's October, which means the fall decorations have made an appearance, most of them dealing with the Halloween theme. Halloween now ranks second, just behind Christmas, for the amount of money spent on decorations and other paraphernalia for this fall celebration. I know that Virginia City goes all out for Halloween. Decorations show up all over town by the first of October, and by the end of the month, candy abounds, people attend parties, and some businesses or individuals plan fright nights...
I’ve come to the conclusion that work takes up a lot of valuable time better spent in other pursuits. And if I consider not only the time I spend at work, but also the very short time it takes me to walk to the office and back, that extra 30 minutes a day of commute time adds up to over 125 hours a year just in effort spent to get to and from the job, which is more vacation hours than I accrue in a year. The walk itself I enjoy even if it is additional time spent in a work related situation, but still, I think of all the precious daylight hours...
Normally as I work through a typical day, the differences in age and the inevitable clash of outlook on the working life doesn’t exist as far as job production goes. The dedicated people perform their jobs to the best of their abilities, while the slackers, regardless of age, seek to get through a day doing as little as possible. For the most part, age makes very little difference in productivity during an average day on the job. Every once in a blue moon, however, something happens that completely separates the oldsters from the youngsters. I...
It doesn’t take much for us older folks to embarrass the kids. Just the fact that we’re old and wrinkly, we don’t have pierced body parts, nor do we sport garishly dyed Mohawk hairdos (to name just a few of the activities youth engage in to torment their elders) causes many youth to dismiss old people as dried up old prunes incapable of understanding the ‘real world’. Since young people have not experienced older age, they often have a tough time understanding old neighbors and coworkers more senior than themselves, and as a result we often...
Remember when we had strength in our fingers and wrists? Peanut butter jar lids opened easily, bottle caps twisted off with a flick of the wrist, and bags of pretzels or potato chips didn’t stymy us as we attempted to open them. It never occurred to us that possibly we would reach an age when jar lids would present a small problem. Rather, we figured we could conquer any lid, bottle cap, or bag of treats that passed our way without a second thought. Not so, my friends. I spend more time now trying to open some jar lids than I do vacuuming the f...
Ah, the arrogance and ignorance of youth. While we suffered through the pangs of adolescence and young adulthood, we figured we could race through fire and sail out the other end virtually unscathed, we could leap tall buildings in a single bound, and watch out world, here we were, ready to do great things. We would age gracefully, if indeed we aged at all, and we would never grow old and fall prey to aches, pains, gray hair, and all those other unmentionable things that happen to old people. I recall way back when the world was young and my...
