Happy November. November is a sneaky month, a month that sort of hides out between fall and full-on winter. Then it leaps out from behind a leafless tree, in a slightly tattered Halloween costume, to say, “Remember everything you had planned to get done this year? Ain’t gonna happen…again.” So it goes.

I recently came across my inaugural “Ramblings” column, published in the November 3rd, 2004 edition of the Burke County Tribune. For some reason I had always thought that I had started writing this column somewhere around the summer of 2006? Like many things I’ve thought, it turns out I thought wrong.

So, if my math is correct, which is highly unlikely, this is the 16th anniversary edition of “Ramblings”. Dry your eyes.

Much has changed in life between the first and the pert near 400th column. Our kids were still kids, my parents were still the “D” and the “J” of DJs Food Center, Grandpa Ardell’s laugh and Grandma Rose’s kitchen creations still filled the air at the farm. It seems as though our lives expand and grow to a certain point, and then begin to shrink and contract.

This shrinking and contracting doesn’t necessarily lead to emptiness, it can lead to a stripped down version of life that is more authentically full, rather than just “full of it”. Fewer bells and whistles, more prairie breeze.

What has changed in your life over the past 16-years?

It seems like just yesterday that Jodi Benge, in her final “Just Jodi” column, suggested that anyone interested in writing a column should contact the tribune. When I contacted them regarding my interest in giving it a go, they responded with a few questions, such as, why I wanted to write a column, what I planned to write about, and how much I would charge?

My “why” was simply that I enjoy writing, and wanted a consistent reason to purposely engage in it. I thought that I would mainly write about health and nutrition, with a little bit of family life and the general goings on of day-to-day life sprinkled in. As it turns out, and as my Grandpa Ardell hoped, over the years I’ve written very little about health and nutrition. Boring my students with that stuff seemed sufficient enough.

Being a shrewd negotiator, my response to their final question of “how much I would charge”, was, “I didn’t know I was going to get paid?” My wife handles the finances in our household.

I named the column “Ramblings” because that seemed to indicate the least restrictive boundaries of potential future column topics. One can ramble about most anything, and I am grateful to the tribune for providing the space to do just that for the first and third Wednesday of the month over the past 16-years, and to you for reading some of them.

What I wrote 16-years ago still applies, “I enjoy writing, and my dad always told me I should make a career out of it. I’m not quitting my day job just yet, and if you find that you would rather clean your geese on this column than read it, you can blame my dad. It’s always the parents fault.”