A Rebel With A Cause

 Just sitting here, trying very hard to get the gumption to head back outside to rake up some more winter residue. Sitting here thinking...Again, always a little scary, because I am never to sure what is going to surface. There is so very much floating about, almost 59 years, that is..forgive me, math was never my strong suit, so..rough multiplication gives me approx 21,400 days, give or take a few months, (not quite 59). Each day, has left some sort of mark, the brain is only so big, and all of this stuff has had to find a place, so some is buried very deep, and struggles to the surface, to surprise me.
  The surprise today...my very first, and I think perhaps only, protest march. I find that strange, as I tend to feel pretty strong about many things, but, have only marched once. Well....then again, I have always lived in very small places, so marches were never common , as a large march would have consisted of 20 people,lol. However, I did march.
  The year, 1971, so I would have been 15, HOLA, I was young!! The reason, United States Atomic Bomb testing in Amchitka Alaska. The person who managed to get the young people in a dinky little town, all riled up and thinking they could make a difference, Ms. Wendy Flowers. Wow!! I wonder if Ms. Flowers remembers? I call her that, because she was my teacher. She was perhaps the coolest teacher we ever had. She came into the school like a breath of fresh air. I thought she was amazing, and totally modern, something we had never really experienced before. We used to say we were always 10 years behind everywhere else, because stuff took so long to reach us,but..that had it's benefits, I think maybe that is why my honey is almost 10 years younger, lol..we grew up at the same time.
  Ms. Flowers had some pretty neat ideas, she would put records (yes records) on, for our P.E. class. We would all sit in a circle and "dance" , no standing, no movement, except upper body. Hey. loved those classes, and B.T.O. We were finally cool!
  I can't remember how she brought the bomb tests to our attention, but cripes we felt pretty darn strong about the matter. You have to remember, where we lived, we were pretty close to this action. I imagine very few folks even remember this time. Folks who didn't go through the cold war, and grew up less than a decade after Hiroshima, perhaps wouldn't be near as fearful. But, this woman managed to get almost every single teenager in the town out to protest.
  Again, I know we didn't make a drop of difference http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/canadians-campaign-against-nuclear-testing-amchitka-island-don-t-make-wave-1969-1971
  But, we felt good. We tried. So, folks, in amongst the over 21,000 days I have spent on this earth, I , the grandmother of a 15 year old teenage girl, was once a protesters! A rebel, with a cause.