On Her Way…

New Year’s Eve, 1984. My husband, our two little boys and I were visiting my in-laws in Amarillo, Texas. We watched the ball drop and welcomed the new year together.

- Dana Swanson

Our original plan had been to stay over, but I wasn’t feeling up to it. We decided to drive a few hours back to our home in Clovis, New Mexico. It had been a long night. A long year, really. Grandma Marjorie, whom I was really close to, had recently been hospitalized with pneumonia. She’d been in and out of the hospital all year with breathing issues. Watching her health declined over the past few years had hit me hard, and I just needed some time to myself to process.

I settled into the passenger seat. My mind drifted to memories of Grandma Marjorie and her husband, Grandpa Joe.

Back in the 1960s and ’70s, when I was a kid, they’d lived just two hours away from us on a cattle ranch nestled in the Wet Mountains in Colorado. My cousins, siblings, and I spent nearly every weekend there. It’s where I remember being the happiest. Riding horses on the property. Learning chess from Grandma Marjorie. Waking up at 5 A.M. to feed the cattle with Grandpa Joe. We’d do the work that needed to be done, then return to a hot breakfast cooked up by Grandma.