Life's a Stitch

Times have changed in the 40+ (!) years since I finished my undergraduate degree. Googling crazy college stories you get a top ten list, a wide variety of tales from Tinder to other types of hook ups. We probably had our share of similar arrangements in my day, think the Summer of Love, but out of ten stories they would be minimal. 

My dorm stories would include opening a wine bottle with an umbrella, only to have the pointy end come out the bottom end, bottle in tact. Or the time (in NY) when after a night of partying (I'm not sure party was a verb in that era), when five of us crammed into an orange MG MGB GT and drove to Central Park, arriving at 5:00 a.m. to "borrow" a rowboat and row around the lake to watch the sunrise. Funny, my two years older cousin was involved in both those escapades.

In the latter years I remember a long night involving far more red wine than I would now choose to consume and a young woman claiming to have links to others' past lives. It was a warm starry night, sometime in the early pre dawn. She went one by one, telling us our past incarnations. The first one in the circle had been an Egyptian princess, the next a medieval noblewoman. She went round the circle and finally got to me, the last in the line of women with auspicious pasts.

You, she said. I held my breath in wonderment. What was my story going to be? You, she declared strongly, were a prairie pioneer woman. What? Amongst all these queens and duchesses, I crossed the prairies in a covered wagon, hauling wood and collecting kindling? No wonder that book about the Donner Party scared me to death. I must have heard of their fate and dreaded my own expedition on the Oregon Trail. 

Really, though, I have an appreciation for the prairies, with the exception of the absence  of large bodies of water. Remember, from past posts, I am quite happy 1500 miles out at sea, especially when the weather is good and seas are calm.

This past trip to Alberta included daily walks in a park in the high prairie, where the natural vegetation has been preserved, including a huge blue sky, waves of grasslands and shady stands of cottonwood and balsam poplar. The majestic Canadian Rockies in the background, you could almost imagine what it would have been like in years past. 

I wonder, when looking back, what crazy retirement stories will be like?