The cycle of life symbolized in the seasons -- birth/spring, childhood and young adult/summer, middle age/autumn then elderly and death/winter -- seems to spin faster the more years one lives.
Birth and death continue despite special days marked on calendars.
During this holiday season, several loved ones have been especially melancholy because it's the first holiday without their beloved.
Some young parents are giddy, happy as they watch their first child experience their first Christmas. Some have newborns for whom they're thankful.
We have numerous birthdays this time of year throughout the extended family.
This coming Friday is the first birthday of my youngest granddaughter. It would have been her great-grandpa's 99th. He passed on to eternity Monday. He had been a widower for 21 years.
What a spectrum -- a range -- of life between those two!
To try to imagine his mother celebrating his first birthday nearly a century ago makes one realize how life is a continuum with experiences for each relatively similar or common.
Grandpa Beard was the first son born to an Ozark farm family who had five daughters. Ultimately, there would be seven girls and three boys. Life was very different in northwest Arkansas in the 1920s and 1930s than it is now. He and his siblings walked several miles to school. He attended a one-room school house through the eighth grade then started helping his parents on the farm.
A trek to a nearby town may have happened once a week for supplies and to a larger town a bit further once a month and that by horse and wagon. Fields were plowed behind a horse, not with a tractor.
A fireplace and a kitchen stove were the only sources of warmth for the house that had no electricity nor indoor plumbing. I remember his brother telling me that the bedrooms were often so cold that ice formed on the water in the pitcher near the wash basin in the bedroom.
This year, I'll watch my grand babies celebrate birthdays with parties and cake and presents.
He said his family didn't celebrate birthdays and there were no birthday cakes baked. Most likely, using that much sugar during the Great Depression, was out of the question. And, after the Depression, there was World War II with rationing and more deprivation.
This generation is experiencing life much differently than their great-grandparents did. And, most are able to do so because of the sacrifice and perseverance of the former generations who patiently endured privation, worked hard and raised their children to be respectful, obedient, caring people.
Today's children are not isolated beings of chance; they are the product of their parents who are the product of their parents who are the product of their parents -- real, living individuals who lived and loved and ultimately died. Who have stories to tell if we'll listen while they're alive to tell them.
Each of us must realize that we are indelibly tied to those who came before us and recognize the eternal nature of people.
"Never tell a child, 'you have a soul," said George MacDonald (1824-1905), Scottish author, poet and minister. "Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.' As we learn to think of things always in this order, that the body is but the temporary clothing of the soul, our views of death and the unbefittingness of customary mourning will approximate to those of Friends of earlier generations."
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Editor's note: Annette Beard is the managing editor of The Times of Northeast Benton County, chosen the best small weekly newspaper in Arkansas for five years. The opinions expressed are those of the author. She can be reached at [email protected].