Anniversaries come and go. October 3 would have been my sixty-eighth wedding anniversary. We all miss Larry – the hurt remains. It only diminishes a little over the years. We no longer think about Larry every day, but often. Sixty years is a long time to live with someone through “thick and thin.”
Every year, we celebrate the anniversary of the founding of our Nation. Generally, it’s a one-day celebration with red, white, and blue bunting, parades, rodeos, and colorful and booming fireworks. This year, we’ll celebrate all year long.
We’ll spend all of the rest of 2025 and the first half of 2026 counting down to America’s 250th Anniversary, on July 4, 2026. I remember the excitement of the 200th anniversary. I’ll be privileged to have celebrated both the 200th and the 250th.
My State of Colorado came into being one hundred years after the United States of America was formed. So, we’re having our 150th anniversary. I’ve always been so pleased that my state was the very first STATE to grant women the right to vote in 1893. There has always been the discussion that Wyoming was first. However, Wyoming was a territory at the time women were granted the right vote. Other dates granting different peoples the right to vote in free elections are an important happening to celebrate!
Last month, at a time when one of our greatest tragedies happened in 2011, Utah and Colorado suffered shootings. One clearly – to me – politically based; the other, another school. There are the anniversaries of Columbine School, the Aurora theater, Annunciation Catholic School, Sandy Hook Elementary School, the school in Uvalde, Texas, and so many more.
I am convinced that my country is sick, and I have no ideas of how to save her. Anger and retribution abound. Impatience is prevalent. There is more that I cannot / will not say in this blog with the pledge of “no religion; no politics.”
We are, in my opinion producing graduates from high school who don’t seem capable of making sound decisions to protect their country. Do any of us think, how can I help my fellow citizen? How many of us regularly check on our neighbors? And, more – to protect our society?
I am extremely concerned about what occurrence will be the thing we will remember with future anniversaries.
Be Safe and Be Well
The Cranky Crone
Thoughtful comments are appreciated.
By the way, I’m taking a workshop, and we have a poem to write, every day. This one is to the prompt to write a poem that is about something that is unexpected or startling without ever using either word in the poem. So, here is mine.
Fall Prompt Day 5
October 5, 2025
Morning Thoughts
by
Marj Becker
It’s three o’clock in the morning, I wake with words
in my head. A poem, I think. Why couldn’t it happen
during the day? But, there it is, wanting to drive out through
my fingers onto the keyboard into the file for the day.
I rise and stumble to my desk where my computer
grumpily comes awake to receive the keystrokes, the keys
magically translate what is in my head to the computer file.
The poem is done, whether good or bad, I know not. I thank
the keyboard. I thank the computer. I thank my chair and my
desk. Skip always said to treat inanimate objects with respect,
thanking them, giving them an occasional pat with a “good boy,”
or a “good girl.” “They too have a consciousness,” she would say.
My head tells me that it is time to sleep, so I head for bed.
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