By Nancy Patrick

We often think of lives as chapters of a book. Our parents document the early years for us in baby books and school milestone mementos. We feign embarrassment and roll our eyes at them, but our own day of reasoning arrives sooner than we expect. 

Mike and I married at ages eighteen and twenty and have been married fifty-seven years. That means we travel the uphill path to eighty and have decided to face old age positively and assertively. Though we could have postponed our upcoming changes a few years, we thought it wise to make our own decisions and try to avoid difficult choices for our son, our only child.

Mike and I have chosen a lovely retirement community that offers executive homes, independent living apartments, assisted living facilities, and skilled nursing. Our new community provides obvious benefits as we could live the rest of our lives in the same community.

We are in the process of packing for our major move from our house to one of the beautiful homes in the gated community. This move and all difficulties of moving in general have brought to my mind all the other moves during our fifty-seven years.

In all, we have lived in twelve different houses. Regardless of the reasons for the moves, the process of moving creates stress. Each new location requires someone to find a job, housing, and form new friendships. Often these transitions create friction in the marriage as one person or the other has to make sacrifices for the benefit of the other.

Regardless of the different environments, our lives have gone on. As families, we acclimate and move forward. In each of our locations, I have documented our family life with annotated photo albums. I completed about twenty of them by the time Jason graduated from college. I even made albums featuring our granddaughter through her middle school years.

This move seems unique since this community can facilitate our needs for the future. Although I feel excited now about our new house and the opportunities for social interaction, I spent a couple of extra stressful days thinking of this as my “last chapter.” Ironically, we do not define our own last chapters.

Young people die, middle-aged people die, accident victims die. Life guarantees no one a number of days or a healthy medical report. These days teach me treasure the precious nature of life. As I clear out drawers, I find many reminders of the fortunate and blessed life I have had. Growing up in a stable (though sometimes dysfunctional) family can actually contribute to a meaningful life. My family stayed in the same house for many years, so my sister and I had the good fortune to have solid educations with caring teachers. 

Those teachers not only performed their professional jobs but also provided role models for me. I think I began admiring teachers with my first-grade teacher, Miss Smith. My family name was Smith, so I began aspiring to become a Miss Smith myself.

One special reminder of my time in Abilene schools occurs each time I drive by the renovated old Abilene High School building on South 1st Street. When I attended school there, Abilene High had moved to its present location, allowing the building to become Lincoln Junior High. Every day I traveled the tunnel that connected North 1^st to South 1^st so that students had a safe walkway to school.

Lincoln Junior High, now Abilene Heritage Square

In eighth and ninth grades, I used to spend my study hall volunteering in the counselor’s office. One day, I found a box of chocolate-covered cherries in the desk drawer. I had no idea who put it there but (pre)assumed it was a gift for me. I took and ate one of the candies and discovered the next day that no one else was eating them.

I took another piece and enjoyed that one, too. Day and after day the chocolates disappeared until I had eaten them all! I never did know who put the candy there, but no one ever asked me about it.

Another memory related to Lincoln happened in 1971 when I did my student teaching. I will never forget the day a man abducted and murdered Tona Worthington, the little sister of one of my thirteen-year-old students. That tragedy opened my eyes to the many facets of teaching. It showed me the parallel structures of teaching curriculum and modeling a pattern of caring.

Now as I look through the albums that chronicle my life, I realize the fullness and brevity of the life God gave me. The first page of album one shows a pregnant twenty-four-year-old me standing in front of a Christmas tree in the parsonage of Bethel Baptist Church in Princeton, Illinois.

Our son Jason was born a few months later during my first experience with a blizzard. Those three years taught me a lot about ministry, including the importance of recognizing personality differences among congregants. I learned that ministering includes patience and love for all people, even the difficult to love.

Over the following years my albums illustrate Jason’s experiences as he goes from K-12 making friends and developing into the man he has become. I think the albums depict my life—the happy, the sad, the instructive, the funny, the important, and the mundane. I look forward to this chapter as an integral part of my story.   

Nancy Patrick is a retired teacher who lives in Abilene and enjoys writing