Spend Time With Your Parents While You Can

By: Betsy Reason

My dad turned 97 on Monday.

I went back home to celebrate his birthday with family, friends and neighbors on Sunday afternoon.

It was nice seeing my cousins and my aunts. Of my mom’s seven siblings, four sisters, including my 91-year-old mom, are still living. On my dad’s side, he still has one younger brother living.

I’ve been so lucky to still have my dad and mom, who live within a mile of the farmhouse in which my dad was born and in the same mile that my mom grew up.

At 97, my dad still has a good memory of life growing up in his hometown, the U.S. Navy of which he served during World War II and all of the years leading up to the present.

Every time I go home to see my parents, I get sentimental. I think of all of the great times I had as a child at home, playing in the yard, roasting wieners over the outdoor fireplace that my dad made, riding bicycles together on the country roads, putting out garden, picking strawberries, play board games, canning green beans in the kitchen with my mom and learning about woodshop in the garage with my dad.

While it’s been 37 years since I lived at home, it seems like yesterday.

I don’t think that I appreciated all of that back then, like I do now.

When you’re a kid, you spend a lot of time with your parents. But then as you become a teenager and are in high school, get your driver’s license, and then go to college and make your own life, you spend less and less time. Then as you get older, you realize how important it is to spend time with your parents. To learn from them, to bond with them, and to hear their stories and pass those stories on to the next generation.

I feel that even more so now, because my own daughter is going into her senior year of high school this fall. It feels like the years have flown.

We try to make our daughter understand the importance of spending time with and learning from her grandparents on both sides of the family.

To savor that time with them, because they won’t be around forever.

-Betsy Reason writes about people, places and things in Hamilton County. Contact The Times Editor Betsy Reason at betsy@thetimes24-7.com.