Fast away the old year passes ...

Sumner Garnes, who lived in Leoti, Kansas, sent this card postmarked Dec. 30, 1911, to his first-cousin, my grandmother, Jessie Frances (Brown) Miller, to mark the transition into 1912. That was 110 years ago.

Grandmother was living at the time on a farm in English Township, Lucas County, having married my grandfather some years earlier.

Before that, she had lived with her mother, Chloe, at the principal crossroads in tiny Columbia, Iowa. The family living room housed the Columbia switchboard and so Grandmother was more-or-less in charge of managing the latest technology to facilitate her neighbors' communication with the outside world. 

The switchboard that served the rural neighborhood around what now is Williamson Pond was located at the time in the living room of my grandfather-to-be and his mother --- and they were the communications gatekeepers for their neighbors. Grandmother and Grandfather met while settling the accounts of one neighborhood telephone company with another.

I'm sitting here before dawn this morning, as the world floods into my study area without benefit of a switchboard operator or comparable filter, considering the Colorado wildfires, the approach of our first major winter storm, damnfool acquaintances who decline to take even the most basic of precautions against COVID-19 and the follies of humanity in general. Wondering, as 2022 approaches, how my grandparents viewed the approach of 1912 more than a century ago.

We do not live in encouraging times. I'm not an optimist. But warm wishes for a better new year --- despite it all.