Savoring February

February is a month to be at home, not traveling during the cold weather…enjoying sunrise through a window, maybe opening the front door and taking a quick picture. The nights are still long enough that it doesn’t require getting up early to see the sunrise; the challenge is to look at the right time; I like to skew early in the sunrise to get the pinks rather than the later orange.

February is also a month to remember my grandmothers. They were both born in February and lived long enough for me to know them well. One lived until I was in my 30s; the other almost twenty more years. They were very different personalities and had been shaped by their lives. One was my only grandparent to graduate from high school; she had married after high school and had 9 children; her husband had owned grain elevators/mills; she had taken over running the business about the time I was born when my grandfather has an extended illness. My other grandmother told her granddaughters that her favorite subject in school was arithmetic; she married at 16 and had her only child at 19;  she and my grandfather farmed until a drought forced them into town shortly after I was born; the health challenges she had during her 20s and 30s could have been a disaster but she stayed healthy for the rest of her life…living until a few months shy of her 99th birthday; she would have been 110 this year.

Everyone develops their ideas for living by observing the adults they are around early in life…and then more selectively as we grow older. I am realizing how fortunate my life has been to have both grandmothers as I was growing up and then after I was an adult too. The final lessons from them were about growing old gracefully…rolling with what aging brings and still finding joy in living.