Noralee Carrier - Potts
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Noralee Carrier - Potts |
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| Lawton, MI | ||
| [email protected] | ||
| My husband, Bill, and I will be married for 32
years this October. Around that same time, our oldest son, Brandon, and his wife, Robyn,
will be presenting us with our first grandchild. Brandon, 30, and Nathan, 29, both live
and work in Grand Rapids. Our two youngest sons — Adrian, 24, and Ryan, 23, are still
living at home, but making plans to be out on their own soon (and I am very ready
for this). Adrian finished his basic and advanced training for the Marine Corps Reserves
earlier this year. Ryan leaves for basic training in San Diego in October. After our last son graduated from high school, we moved from Grand Rapids to Cedar Lake, five miles south of Lawton, Michigan. We adjusted quickly to the sounds of songbirds in the morning and geese flying over the lake. The resident blue heron likes to lurk on our dock and steal fresh-caught fish from the live well. Our chocolate lab, Tucker, has never known anything but the open countryside and the freedom of jumping in the lake whenever he feels like it. Bill goes out in his fishing boat with Tucker along as a living hood ornament. I like to fish too, but having recently adopted a vegetarian lifestyle for myself, I feel guilty actually catching them, so I watch from the deck with our Persian cat, Lucy. We recently had her shaved because her fur was so long she was unable to adequately groom herself. Now it looks like two cats were taken apart and reassembled and they put Lucy’s head on the wrong body — like some creature from a Spielberg movie. And no, we are not retired. Bill is an independent contractor in the financial field, and I work from home, editing and proofreading manuscripts for publishing companies. We’ve done the paperwork. We can retire five years after we die. Presently we are considering taking over the music program at a Presbyterian church in Hastings, Michigan. This would be a full time position for both of us and would require a move, so leaving the lake is going to be tough. It would, however, put us closer to Grand Rapids and our children and grandchild, so it has its good points, too. I was struck the other day, when we went to see Pearl Harbor, by the ceaseless pattern from generation to generation. I watched the young soldiers and nurses on the screen, realizing that they were portraying my parents’ generation, and realizing that my parents were once young and vibrant and invincible, just as we were 25 years later. Now it’s our children who are young and vibrant and invincible. Like it or not, we have become our parents. Why does it seem like we graduated only yesterday? |