Using Hindsight

I was never much of reader. I enjoyed books about management, people, leadership, psychology. But when we put our TV in the closet (another story for another time) I became desperate for escape. I started to ask people who I knew enjoyed reading for book recommendations. My sister in law was an english major, and I have always heard stories of her spending hours upon hours reading. She had some wonderful suggestions. That was three years ago, and now, I feel lost if I don't have a book to be working though.

Just recently, I picked up a book from our library about a woman who was a farm wife for 17 years. She was raised by a professor in Minneapolis. She went to a good college and was praised for her intellectual accomplishments. She never dreamed she would live on a farm- being terribly ignorant of farm life. Ironically, though, she married a farm-raised boy. They lived a quiet, comfortable, two-income life for the first few years of their marriage until 1943, when her father-in-law had a heart attack. He needed help with the farm, and they made the hasty decision to move back and help for a year. And that's how her 17 year life-altering journey began.

The first few chapters about her struggles struck such a parallel with my feelings during the first few months of our move to Iowa that I actually started tearing up. I have been reading this book, feeling so much of what she feels, clinging to the idea that in the end, she will find everlasting goodness in their decision; that as an 86 year old woman looking back, she could not have seen her life any other way.

Though our lives are years apart, (and I have running water- did I mention I love running water?) I hold fast to the notion that those initial struggles and fears dissolved into joy and contentment with her life- albeit different from what she had first dreamed of or wanted. And though I know in my mind that it holds no actual bearing upon my life- in my heart, I want to know that when she stepped off the beaten path of her comfortable life and turned down this narrow, winding, treacherous path, it turned out to be the exact road she was supposed to be on. Looking back.