The stories in our hands

While peeling potatoes a few weeks ago I saw my mother’s fingers clenching the vegetable and noticed how my fingers so closely resemble hers. I recognized the slightly swollen knuckles on rather short fingers attached to hands displaying raised veins. I wondered why that vision crossed my mind.

I usually shrug off such instances that occasionally flit through my brain. For some reason, this felt different. Messages relayed from a potato began haunting me in a similar way that nighttime dreams sometimes do.

I began thinking about the trajectory of my life that includes 50 years of sharing experiences with the same man. I reminisced about magical trips when we traveled to different parts of the world as we moved in unison around Italy, Brazil, Australia, and Mexico. I smiled thinking about the nine years when we donned white pants and shirts that accompanied metal whistles around our necks as we officially refereed club swim meets. I recalled repairing our Midwest home after a tornado ripped through our neighborhood.

And then I began thinking about how our lives have melded into a pattern of each of us walking our own career paths and realized that the very act of potato peeling might represent it was time to forge a new path now so we can spend more time together.

After a month of contemplation, I knew my time with the Estes Valley Voice needed to become another treasured memory. I’ve officially retired twice before, but this time feels different. Unless something interferes, I believe it will be the last.

Years ago a best friend who wrote for a national publication emphatically encouraged me to document experiences growing up in the middle of the Colorado prairie where nearly nothing but sagebrush grew and some experiences were of the variety my child, her cousins, and their children think has be to fiction.

Last Thanksgiving my sister and I agreed to edit material our father wrote about training to pilot B-17s and enduring time in a German POW camp during WWII. I haven’t started either project.

In other words, I doubt I’ll abandon telling stories. But I need to take time away from the pace of creating published news focused on taxing districts, along with the people and events in the Estes Valley.

That information remains as critical today as it was two years ago when Patti Brown encouraged me to return to the news business.

Patti is an incredible mentor and inspiration for all the writers who work with her as well as for this community. She is totally dedicated to Estes Valley Voice’s mission of producing a professional, independent, and locally owned news publication for the Estes Valley.

I’m proud to have been involved in this endeavor which is a passion for both Patti and me.
I don’t know what the next session with a russet Idaho potato will encourage. But I do know that as I retire again that I have thoroughly enjoyed telling the stories of the area and getting to know the people who make Estes Park the incredible town we all love.

My dream today is that Patti Brown and the Estes Valley Voice continue their journey. I pledge my total support to witness their total journalistic success on behalf of all of us.