[Monday: 3 miles; Wednesday 3 miles (both on S Grandview)]
My wife had a co-worker with great interest in the US Civil War due in part to the existence of the diary of an ancestor. For the Iowa statehood Sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) the two of them put together a presentation. They went to a few places in the state and performed it. They both wore “period” clothing. She wore a cotton blouse and a bonnet and a long heavy wool skirt. He wore a reproduction Union soldier uniform. This culminated with multiple daily presentations at the Iowa State Fair that summer in the Pioneer Hall building (and her immersion in the bluegrass music events there, which hardened her dislike for bluegrass).
Somewhere around here I have a VHS tape of one of their presentations.
Later that year we moved to Colorado.
After we had been in Colorado a little while she started to have some health issues and over the next 10 years things slowly went downhill.
I would sometimes play a little bit of that VHS tape and be reminded of what she was like before the problems came along. I didn’t do that very often because I needed to not get lost in retrospection; there were immediate responsibilities and things to be done. It was a nice break, but sad.
Then things unexpectedly got better and I haven’t watched that tape in a long time. It is around here somewhere. If I spot it I will grab a frame and we can see what her outfit looked like. (I still have a VHS player so that I can play that tape if I want to.)
Yesterday I read that this year is the Iowa Statehood Dodransbicentennial (175th anniversary).
Like the waves on the ocean, illness brought unwanted instability and variation and complication. But she was the same person underneath. And for awhile I didn’t know if we were going to be permanently in the land of chaos or find our way back. I am happy to report we survived it.
A lot happened in the last 25 years.