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I’ve had many friends come and go during my life. Some have stayed a long time like those who attend the reunions of my high school graduating class. A few moved away for a while, but returned to this area I’ve never left. I remember them all fondly.

As I think back, some seem to have served a specific purpose. In 1966, our family moved into the home we bought in Durand. My neighbor, Sherrill, who lived two houses down the block, became my lifeline. We each had three children who were matching ages and played together. Her husband, who worked the second shift in a Rockford factory, was gone during the late afternoons and evenings. My husband was often gone at that time, too, either working a shift with the sheriff’s police or moonlighting driving a semi.

Sherrill knocked on our front door so often that when my kids went to see who was there they got in the habit of yelling to me, “It’s just Sherrill,” and invited her in.

She and I played a lot of Scrabble or just enjoyed adult conversation. We were both interested in the community. The actions of the village government and the school board affected us directly. Our oldest children were in first grade and the others would soon follow. Sherrill and her husband moved away after their kids finished high school.

I don’t include family on my list of friends. Each one of them holds a unique place in my heart. I lived with my parents until I married at twenty-one. No one has shared as much of my life as my husband of nearly sixty-two years. I’ve added in-laws, children and grandchildren. Friends are the people I complain to when I’m upset with someone related to me.

Who makes up your friends list?

March is designated Women’s History Month in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Women’s contribution to history, culture and society are celebrated. We may admire a movie star, a singer or an activist who is in the news, but we never know the real person.

I think we should also remember the women who didn’t make headlines, but have made us who we are. Of course, mothers come to mind first, but there have been many more including grandmothers, aunts, cousins and big sisters. We also need to look outside our families such as older friends, teachers or mentors at work. There also are a few who are stark examples of who we don’t want to become.

When I was a newlywed, I vowed I wasn’t going to be like my mother. She farmed alongside Dad and didn’t take part in neighborhood women’s activities. My husband was the hired man on his brother-in-law’s farm and I was a housewife and mother. I would also be a community volunteer.

After a few years of working with various committees, which drove me nuts, I decided that I was probably more like my mother than I had wanted to admit. She rarely talked about her feelings, but I thought maybe we both tended to be loners.

When my husband left the farm to become a cop and our three children were enrolled in the Durand schools, I discovered a part-time job reporting community news for our daily newspaper, the Rockford Morning Star. I was a freelancer working on my own from home, which suited me just fine. I dropped most of my organization memberships.

Who are some of the women in your life who never made headlines, but made you who you are?

We spend a large part of our lives doing things we’ve never done before. It begins as soon as we’re born and continues with our parents’ delight in our first words and first steps. As we age, we keep accumulating firsts–first day of school, first driver’s license, first date, first kiss, first baby, first senior citizen discount and first grandchild are among the many highlights. Times change and we change with them.

I entered marriage and parenthood with little knowledge of how to do either one, but eager to try. All I had was my experience as an only child with my parents coupled with my husband’s knowledge of growing up with an older sister and a younger brother plus Dr. Spock’s book, “Baby and Child Care.” From time to time, I would be at my wit’s end with our three kids. Ken’s encouragement was, “You sound just like my mother.”

Now I’m celebrating one of the greatest firsts in my life–the publishing of my memoir by Adelaide Books, an independent New York firm. “The View from a Midwest Ferris Wheel” is the story of our seven-year courtship, which began in July 1952 with a Ferris wheel ride when Kenny was sixteen and I was fourteen. It’s for sale on Amazon in Kindle or paperback form.

I slipped into the world of writing through the side door of learn by doing. Trying to do something we haven’t done before can be frustrating. We have to be prepared to make mistakes, but how boring our lives would be if we never tried anything new.

“You are not too old and it is not too late” is posted on my refrigerator. It’s at eyelevel and reminds me several times a day to keep moving forward.

What are some of your memorable firsts?

March brings a much-needed end to winter. Daylight saving time begins March 14 and the first day of spring is the twentieth. It’s a time when dandelions, robins and green grass are a welcome sight.

To me, it’s a new beginning. While I was growing up, my parents rented a farm instead of buying one. Landlords changed tenants March 1 before spring field work began. About every three years, we moved to a different neighborhood. I still remember the five different farm owners we dealt with.

Moving day on a family dairy farm was a big production completed between morning milking and evening milking. Friends, relatives and neighbors were recruited with their pick-up trucks and hayracks. A livestock trucker was hired to move the cows, pigs and horses. Chickens were caught and confined in wooden crates to be transported in the back of pick-ups to their new home. The machinery and household goods were loaded onto hay racks. The women carried precious items with them inside cars.

The three of us only used the main floor of the large, tw0-story homes that rarely had a furnace. Stoves were extinguished and rekindled at the new place. In the kitchen, a cookstove burned kindling or coal briquets. A noon meal was prepared to feed the hungry moving crew. An oil burner heated the living room and two bedrooms.

The following day, I was the new kid among ten or twelve students at the nearby country school.

In 1947, we settled on the Anderson farm northwest of Durand, my home until I married in 1959. My parents stayed there through 1970 when the landlord sold the farm. My folks, who were in their sixties, quit farming and had a home built in Durand. Dad took a job as a school janitor and, for the first time in her life, my mother was ‘just a housewife’.

What does the month of March signify to you?

One of the tasks of growing up is deciding who we want to be. The image we adopt consists of several personas and may change as time passes. I’m a female, a daughter, a wife, a mother, a grandmother and a writer. Traces remain of that young, tomboy who wore overalls and preferred batting a softball with the boys in grade school instead of playing jacks with the girls.

Not everything I do becomes part of my image. I was the Durand Township clerk for 46 years, but I considered that just a convenient, part-time job.

I show various sides of myself in different circumstances and dress appropriately. When I was a young mother with two daughters who were Girl Scouts, I wore a dignified pants suit to help chaperone the troop visiting the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Department. My husband was a deputy and I had arranged the trip on a Tuesday after school. A uniformed officer gave us the tour including the jail. He commented to me quietly, “You don’t look the same as the last time I saw you.”

I replied, “Neither do you.” The previous Saturday evening, he had met me as a colleague’s wife at a cop party. At that time, we were adults wearing leisure clothes, drinking beer and relaxing together.

I can no longer be a daughter except in my memories.

When I fix a holiday dinner for my family, I’m a grandmother wearing jeans and a top that’s easily washed in case I slop something.

Bermuda shorts and a sleeveless blouse are the order of the day while I attend a writers’ workshop during the summer. For a week, I’m a woman and a writer.

What identities make up your image?

Yesterday I spent over a half-hour on hold waiting to speak to a person at a large corporation. I beg to differ with their canned message stating, “Your call is important to us.” If they really cared about their customers, they’d hire enough people to keep the wait to a reasonable time, such as five minutes.

The so-called music that was played interspersed with ads had to be the most annoying noise they could find. It reminded me of the summer a neighbor boy was learning to play the coronet. Windows were open so I could easily hear him. He repeated the same few beginning notes to a song. Apparently, he kept making the same mistake and started over again and again.

Whenever I have to make a phone call to clear up a problem with a big business, I prepare like I’m taking a long journey–go to the bathroom, get a drink and bring a snack. It doesn’t seem to matter what company I’m dealing with or the day of the week I make the call.

I don’t have anything pressing to do, but I still don’t like to sit and sit with my phone in my hand. I think back to when I had three little kids under foot. At that time, they’d take advantage of Mom being tied to the wall phone and do things they weren’t supposed to.

Today I had an email survey that asked, “How would you rate your recent call experience with Nicole?” Boxes numbered from 1 to 10 were included. Nicole was a 10. It took less than a minute for her to solve my problem.

There also was a box to type a message about my feelings for the company. I told them about my dislike of spending so much time on hold. I don’t expect a change, but I tried.

Do you get as annoyed as I do with long waits on hold?

Sunday is Valentine’s Day, the season of love. I remember the first time Kenny said, “I love you, Honey.” It was the end of our last Saturday night date before he began a four-year hitch in the navy.

I was flabbergasted. It took me a few seconds to respond, “I love you, too, and I’ll wait for you.”

The next day, love songs playing on the radio seemed meant just for us, especially Nat ‘King’ Cole’s “Too Young.” My boyfriend was eighteen and I was sixteen.

Music reflects feelings and stirs memories. In 1957, Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” described my loneliness with Ken in the navy. I was working in the office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Rockford. During our morning and afternoon breaks at the Cumming’s Coffee Shop, I took advantage of 3 plays for a quarter to hear the song on their jukebox over and over. I was probably driving my four co-workers nuts, but I didn’t care.

For our first dance in the Grange Hall after our church wedding, April 17, 1959, the Bel Air Ranch Boys played “I Love You Truly” while their leader, John Pela, crooned into the microphone.

When we celebrated our Golden Anniversary in 2009 with an open house at the Legion Hall, our friend, Roger, strummed Anne Murray’s hit recording “Could I Have This Dance (for the rest of my life)” for our solo dance.

Later, Roger played “our song,” Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans.” Those lyrics about the War of 1812 aren’t romantic, but the memories they evoked made Ken and me smile. That recording had saturated the air waves while we were honeymooning in the Big Easy. It also reminded us of our conflicts through the years that seemed important at the time, but now were forgotten.

What are your favorite love songs?

Sunday will be football’s Super Bowl. Businesses will pay out big bucks to have their products aired during the game. Sometimes the ads are more interesting than the sport, especially if your team isn’t playing.

I have a love/hate relationship with ads. Occasionally they’re helpful but most of the time they’re just annoying. In the evenings, when a commercial comes on while I’m watching TV, I do household chores such as move a load of clothes from the washer to the dryer or personal things like going to the bathroom. The commercials for election candidates, the time to change your Medicare coverage and Christmas shopping seem to go on forever. I know they’re necessary to make the programs I enjoy possible.

I usually read around ads in newspapers and magazines. One of the first things I was surprised to learn when I started reporting for a daily was the size of each edition was determined by the amount of advertising sold, not the happenings of the day. They only printed the articles that would fill the news hole, space left after they laid out their paid advertising.

Once in a while, an ad alerts me to something I can use. When our family dentist retired, he didn’t sell his business so I had to find someone else on my own. I saw a TV ad for the Rockford dentist who had cared for Linda, our developmentally different daughter. I had liked him at the time, but after she died in 2008, I’d forgotten him. I called to make an appointment.

A few years ago, a magazine ad for a pair of summer sneakers caught my eye. I couldn’t find the shoes in any of the surrounding cities but I couldn’t forget them either. I ordered them on line, which I don’t like to do with anything that needs to fit. They were fine and I’ve continued to enjoy them during warm weather.

How do you feel about ads?

The family has been called that the end is near. Picture them gathered around Grandma lying in the bed she shared with Grandpa for more than fifty years. Her son and daughter are sitting on opposite sides holding her hands. Grandchildren gather behind the footboard to show their love. She speaks her last words and draws her final breath. That imaginary Saturday Evening Post cover painted by Norman Rockwell is what the American people like to believe happens, but many times people die alone.

I remember the actualities in my own life. Ken and I had been married three years and were the parents of two daughters when our brother-in-law called about seven o’clock on an October evening. He said my husband’s parents had been in an auto accident driving home from their jobs in Rockford. Dad had been killed instantly and Mom was in critical condition at a nearby hospital. Ken and I deposited our girls with my parents and rushed to sit in the hospital waiting room with his brother, sister and brother-in-law. After about two hours, a doctor came to tell us that despite their best efforts, Mom passed away.

Fourteen years later, an evening phone call from my mother brought the news that my father had died of a heart attack. They were on a tour bus trip and had been attending an outdoor pageant when Dad was stricken. A fast ambulance ride brought them to a hospital. She had been sitting alone in the waiting room five-hundred miles from home when a physician told her that they couldn’t save her husband.

Through the years, we’ve known families in the community that have received that ominous notice from the U.S. Army that their son has been killed in a faraway war.

Members of my cop family have been called for victims of murder, suicide and drug overdose.

Have you had an opportunity to tell a loved one a final goodbye?

The Christmas season is past and we’re in the middle of the January clearance sales. Instead of driving to the mall, I’m becoming adept at online shopping. I prefer ordering items that can be easily measured such as a bathroom rug, but I have bought two pairs of shoes because I couldn’t find what I wanted in any area store. So far, I haven’t had to return anything.

I’m reminded of the old time-catalogs from Sears & Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. On one of those cold, snowy days early in the new year, when we felt winter was never going to end, our mail box was brightened with new spring and summer catalogs. The covers featured pretty women decked out in colorful, sleeveless dresses and handsome men wearing polo shirts and slacks. Those books were about an inch-and-a half thick with at least ninety pages featuring everything from bras to bicycles.

The last thing I remember ordering was a set of china dishes called Moss Rose. While thumbing through the pages of Monkey Ward’s new offerings, the modern-looking, round, white plates with a gold edge and trimmed with pink roses captivated me. Ken was in the navy and we weren’t engaged, but I believed we would be married when he finished his four-year hitch.

The books came in handy in many ways. When I was small and ate a meal at Aunt Frannie’s table, she piled the two on a chair to act as a booster seat for me.

Frugal farmers didn’t throw the old editions away when the new ones arrived. The outdated tomes were stashed in the outhouse. The paper wasn’t as soft as modern toilet tissue but it did the job.

Do you remember mail-order catalogs?