My college son spent some time over his Easter weekend volunteering for the Rock County Historical Society. It was an assignment for school, and he was grateful that Betty Mann had some work at the museum that he could help with.
Somewhere in the process of clipping and filing information at the museum, he came across a 20-year-old newspaper page with an early photo of his mother.
It was a column mug shot taken on my first day at the Star Herald in 1993.
Amused, he snapped a photo of the page and sent it to me. “Yes,” I replied to him. “Your mother is history.”
Most grownups eventually reach this realization — after all, the older we get, the more we join the ranks of history.
But in the newspaper business, our work is recorded weekly in black ink on white paper, and there’s something about the ever-accumulating archives that serve as material reminders of our accumulating age.
I first felt like history when my own work started showing up in the “10 years ago today” portion of the Star Herald “Remember When” column. In a couple of years, I’ll start reading my stories from 25 years ago in that column (assuming I’m still here).
That’s probably appropriate, since I find myself starting sentences with the words “Remember when we used to …”
It happened Saturday after a duck on the road prompted a conversation with my husband about our childhood days on the farm with chickens, ducks, pigs and other barnyard animals.
Of course we had vivid recollections of headless birds running circles around the yard during butchering. And we recalled farm kitchen assembly lines processing chicken meat, pork rendering and endless garden produce.
Those were the days of small-scale production farming primarily for personal consumption.
Another sure sign of old age is finding that old things from our past are trendy again.
Just like 80s-style shoulder pads and leggings, small-scale farming is back in style in the form of “natural” and “organic” products.
Hmm. Our parents were trendy and they didn’t even know it.
Our “free-range” chickens and pigs were as “natural” and “organic” as it gets, and our daily meals were farm fresh and “farm to table” like healthy families aspire to today.
Of course, back then it was cool to eat store-bought cookies, but I suppose that’s why we hear about age and wisdom.
We really had it pretty good back then, but it’s taking old age for us to look back and appreciate it.
While it’s no fun to realize we’re history, we can at least enjoy the trendy status that comes with it.