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Writing Prompt #74

Contemplating the End of It All

And wondering if there’s a future worth fighting for

FranMorelandJohns
Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age
5 min readJan 14, 2025

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Photo credit: The author

Start? Fresh start? I just wanted an end.

I’d actually made a fresh start three decades ago. In the best move of my life, I had thrown everything up into the Georgia air and watched it come down in San Francisco:

I was 58, he was 62. We’d had an on-again, off-again romance when I was in college and he was a Marine draftee during the Korean War. That was in the early 1950s. Thirty-seven years later, after leading separate lives on separate coasts, we’d unexpectedly, serendipitously met — and exactly 11 months later we’d married.

On that fresh start, I moved from Decatur, Georgia, where I’d been a newspaper writer with regular front-page bylines, a business owner, an activist, a PTA president, a Sunday School teacher, the mother of Skip, Sandy, and Pam — and suddenly became “that woman from the South that Bud married.” Not easy.

But with a lot of help and support, I made new friends, tackled new causes, picked up an MFA, published several books, traveled across oceans and continents, and had the best time of my life. Bud, also known as the Great Encourager, was at my side until his death on Valentine’s Day in 2019.

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Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age
Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

Published in Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

“The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.” (Frank Lloyd Wright) Non-fiction pieces, personal essays and occasional poems that explore how we feel about how we age and offer tips for getting the most out of life.

FranMorelandJohns
FranMorelandJohns

Written by FranMorelandJohns

Lifelong newspaper & magazine writer, author, blogger at franjohns.net, agitator for justice, kindness & interfaith understanding.

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