I was driving home yesterday from a birthday party which took me about a solid hour. I had just about made it home when I realized that I had driven 55 minutes in complete silence. I never turned the radio on, my phone had not rung, and I had not received one message or notification. It came to me that I had been thinking all the way home. Not about anything in particular, but just a little of this and that. It was that perfect time of day of when the sun was setting, and the sky looked like a watercolor painting. It was warm in the car, so I had the window partly down and the breeze was cool, but still had bit of warmth left to it from the setting sun. One of the things that had crossed my mind was my grandmother. She just recently turned 97 years old. This last week, her furnace stopped working and we had to have someone come out to look at it for her. She doesn’t quite understand that the amount of money it takes this day and age to fix something when it breaks. Instead of having her be upset about the money, we just told her that it would be fixed, and the cost would be minimal. That situation made me get to thinking about why she would be upset, and it didn’t take me long to realize. She was born in the 20’s, a time where the country was in a financial crisis, money wasn’t easy to come by and most families had multiple children in order to have help on family farms as soon as the kids were old enough to work. She has never had much, always been poverty level on some degree. She was raised with the mindset to never waste anything, and unless it could not be fixed, you didn’t buy new. Most of the time you went without anyways because you couldn’t afford it. Kids these days laugh at the old stories of a one room schoolhouse and memes of walking a mile to school barefoot, when in reality that is exactly what she had to do. Although, she did it with the younger siblings at her feet and would be the first to school to start an old coal stove for heat. I can’t think of a time in her life that has been easy going or without some sort of heart ache. She is now the only surviving child out of 11 kids. Most of her family has passed before her, and even those friends that she has known, have passed. She is a woman of great strength. She lives by the means of a small check given to her once a month. She saves her money in envelopes to pay bills and has a hard time understanding why she can’t pay those bills locally in person. She has lived through 16 different presidents, and 6 major wars. She has never had cable, a vcr, a cd player, or a computer. She still uses a rotary phone and listens to Elvis on an old record player. Her favorite book is the bible, and she has read it more times that most people. When I think about her, I don’t see a feeble old woman. I see a woman that has conquered more in her lifetime than most will in half of theirs. I see a woman to took care of everyone else long before she took care of herself. I see a woman who takes everything thrown her way, and deals with it. I don’t know that I can ever be even a portion of who she was. I say was because with every passing year, her mine isn’t as quite as sharp as it used to be and things that she would have normally power housed right through, take a little bit longer. She also comes from a time when things were broken, you tried to fix it. You didn’t take it and just throw it away. That is a problem I see far too often in people. Whether it be a relationship, a broken handle on an axe, or even their own children, they are too quick to throw it away instead of taking the time or energy to try and fix it. A lot of us would do well to take a look back and listen to a few of the stories from those that came long before us and learn a little something.