What Year Is Your Favorite?

By Betsy Ashton

I don't have a favorite year. I have favorite years. By that, I mean I have years I think about with pleasure. I wonder what it would be like to relive them.

I loved my sophomore year in high school because I got my first horse. Not a horse I rented, but one I had to feed, groom and ride. I learned all about mucking out stalls (horse poop smells good, pee not at all), picking poop out of hooves, brushing coats until they gleamed and my arms ached. Horses are hard work, but what they give back in love and teaching patience are lessons never to be forgotten. Would I like to relive that sophomore year? Not really. Yes, the horse was wonderful, but to relive that year would mean taking English with a woman who was usually so drunk she fell out of her chair. Engilish was at 10. She arrived drunk and left drunker, if that's a word. No, no reliving sophomore year.

How about undergraduate years? Oh my yes, I'd relive all of those. I had wonderful professors, even the one whose favorite word was plethora. He told the class that no one would get higher than a B because then we had taught him something. What a pompous ass! I got an A. I taught him something he didn't know. He threw down a challenge; I took it up. The class: Chinese history. I still have friends from undergraduate days at UCLA. We've grown together, but I don't think any of us want to go back to that time.

Well, maybe we should. That was a period of great political and social movements when we were young and naive enough to think our sheer numbers could change the world. Looking back, we did change the world, just not in the way we imagined. If we could recapture some of that energy, maybe we could influence events happening today.

I don't need to return to one of my favorite years. In January 1981 I met my dear husband. In a bar. In Tokyo. I relive our years together every day when I look at his smiling face, when we work together in a shared office, when we eat dinner and when we lie together at night. I don't need to go back. Going forward is enough.

So, I don't have a favorite year. Parts of every year are favorites. Each form memories that are woven into the tapestry that is me. Each year, more threads arrive. I remember them all with love and gratitude. Even the drunk in high school English.

What are your favorite memories?

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Betsy Ashton is the author of Mad Max Unintended Consequences available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. She lives for words and writing.

My Favorite Years by Alison Henderson

Life is sprinkled with watershed events, sometimes watershed years, when everything changes. Being an eternal optimist, I choose to remember and celebrate the years when life took a turn for the better. Bad times I banish to the rubbish heap in the back of my mind as quickly as possible.

One such "favorite" year began when I turned twenty-one in early October of my senior year at Vassar. It was a perfect day in the Hudson River Valley, crisp and bright with brilliant blue skies and glowing fall foliage. My roommate (and lifelong best friend) and her now-husband took me on a picnic on the grounds of the Vanderbilt Mansion, high on the bluffs overlooking the river in Hyde Park. I don't remember what we ate, but I'll never forget the overwhelming sense of well-being I felt in such beautiful surroundings with such close friends. Later that spring, I graduated, got my first job, married my high school sweetheart, and bought a home. It was a year brimming with promises of good things to come. That marriage ended amicably a few years later when we both grew up but in no way dimmed the pleasure of those memories.

Another important year for me was the year I turned forty. Many women may regard forty with dread, but for me it was an age of self-discovery and actualization. Eight years earlier, I had quit my job to stay home with my daughter when she was born. During that time, OG suffered numerous career ups and downs, ranging from sadistic supervisors to employers leaving town, but he persevered in order to give me those important years with my child. By the time I turned forty, he was too beaten down to do it any more, so we switched roles. I went back to work and became the sole provider until I retired. Instead of feeling resentful, I felt empowered. My relationship with my daughter had a rock-solid foundation, and I was proud to be able to give our family financial and emotional stability after a rocky few years.

Because I am such an optimist, my favorite years don't stop there. I still hope for a few yet to come. Perhaps my daughter will marry. Perhaps I'll become a grandmother some day. Perhaps the next book I write will be The One. The future is rife with possibilities, and for that I'm grateful every day. 

Alison
www.alisonhenderson.com
http://alisonhenderson.blogspot.com