My life in These titles mean nothing.

Friend Polly is remembering her life. I wonder what I remember, what I can put into words.

I was born in 1946. My father was a farmer. My mother was a housewife. I was their first child. They were both in their 30s, my mother had been a country school teacher and had worked in a grocery store before she married. My father and his brother farmed their mother’s family farm and had bought an adjoining 80 and then later bought the farm where I live now. The brothers farmed together till the mid 1950s and then split up.

My brother was born when I was four. We went to the country school a mile up the road. My father’s mother had gone there too. I liked school and the one room school attended by maybe a dozen neighbor kids was a special place. You knew each other so well.

I was raised Catholic and the church was an important part of my parents life. When I got out of country school I went to the Catholic high school in our town. I never fit in very well for various reasons. Friendships had already been made when I got there and I never tried very hard to get along with anyone.

My mother died very suddenly of a brain hemorrhage at the end of my freshman year in high school. After that I felt my life was in my own control. I wanted a boy friend. I found the closest one and we went to movies and parked. He was two years older than I was and when he graduated from high school he joined the Navy. We wrote each other for a year and then I latched onto the boy next door in the other direction who had just gotten out of the Marines. He was five years older than I was and seemed vastly mature.

We got married a year after I got out of high school. He was living near Cedar Rapids working in town and living with a farmer who he worked for part time. We bought a trailer for $5500 and parked it at the end of the farmer’s orchard. I started working at Collins Radio, one of CR’s big employers. I started on the line but did not make the probationary period but was then hired to work in the office. After a year I got pregnant and had to take a leave after five months. I did not go back.

Jim was born and three years later John was. My husband worked for the farmer and then worked as a propane delivery man. He lost his job and went to school on the GI bill. We had to move and bought a lot from a neighboring farmer with help from my dad. My husband got his AA degree and started on a law enforcement/forestry course. He also worked for the city of Cedar Rapids at the airport. Also during that time I worked at the credit department at Sears for two and a half years.

In the fall of 1974 my fatherinlaw died. In the spring of 1975 we moved back to my father’s farm so my husband could help his mother and sister with their farm. By then both kids were in school and I started working at the factory in our town. I ran a punch press for nine years and then was given a job in the office. It was a loosely defined job involving statistics and techy stuff, eventually computers and customer relations and quality and sample submissions and various jack of all trades sort of things.

My kids grew up. I had very early breast cancer in 1993. I had a mastectomy and the worst result was that I was deferred from giving blood for five years. Around 2000 my husband’s health declined. He was diagnosed with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. He died in 2002, slowly and then suddenly. He is buried in a cemetery not far from where I am and my name is already on his tombstone.

The factory I worked in closed in 2008. I collected unemployment for six months and then was hired by anther factory that did screen printing of graphics for beer coolers. I stayed there till they went to digital printing and then I went to the wiring harness factory where I am now. Of course it is closing now too and I am not sure if I will retire or look for another job. Probably a little of both.

This is a very bare bones account of my life. It’s not that I’ve left some things out, it’s that I’ve left everything out. Maybe I’ll try a year at a time. Maybe I’ll try an emotion at a time. Suggest something if you’d like.