Life Treasures

Dreams I never dreamed, but they came true anyway!

As I hoed weeds in the corn field or picked cotton as a young girl growing up in rural Georgia I didn’t give a lot of thought to what my life would be when I grew up. I would stand and listen as the lonesome wail of a steam engine floated over the red dirt fields. I knew it was pulling cars filled with people and cargo to faraway places. I wished that I might someday board one and travel to different places, but didn’t really expect it would happen.

Fast forward fifty years and my sister and I are boarding an airplane at Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport. We’ll land in New York, change to an Alitalia International flight for Rome, Italy, and then to Jerusalem in Israel. Prior to that trip, my first in a plane, I had indeed ridden a high speed (at the time) passenger train from Villa Rica, GA to Washington D.C. and New York City on my high school senior trip.

Between that memorable rail trip and exciting first plane flight in my life much had happened. Marriage, motherhood, a move to another state, a career in the communications industry, became a grandmother, retirement and finally a much desired college degree. Not to forget the beginnings of a second career as a writer with the publication of several original short stories. Other milestones in that endeavor, leadership roles in two writers’ groups, publication of mystery novels in two series, traditional and self-published.

But I most value the people who have enriched my life during all those years, certainly including my birth and church families. But that girl in the cotton field could never have imagined that one day she would count among her friends three women who had earned a pilot’s license. Or one who was born in England and married an American Air Force Sergeant who brought her to Tennessee. A dozen or more who have touched many lives as education professionals, several as college professors or adjunct professors.

People are the true treasures in life.