Choosing a word for 2022 was pretty easy. This past year, I felt like I spent so much time in survival mode dealing with pancreatic cancer that I didn’t fully live life. So, as you might have already guessed, my word for 2022 is “live”. Every day…
Category: Miscellaneous
I’ll be up front with my word for 2021: In 2020, my word was do. I chose my word before I knew just how craptacular the year would be. Fortunately, it was quite useful to keep me on track: do get out of bed each day; do…
2019 saw my first “word of the year.” It provided some focus in what felt like a rushed, hazy year. It worked well enough that I decided to pick a word again this year. 2020 has already seen a lot of “vision” language, so I decided to…
When my husband and I bought our house, one of my favorite things about the property was the cutest little three-foot tall pine tree planted in the front yard. Seventeen years later, not so little or cute. The tree had grown into a behemoth and it was…
I decided to pick a word for this year. Several other people seem to be doing it and I figured, what the heck? It seems like a good way to bring focus for the year without having to invest in supplies or try to cram one more thing into what feels like an already overstuffed schedule.
In case you are wanting to sort out how to go about selecting your own word for the year, too, here’s what I did:
- Thought about the things I wanted to accomplish in the near future.
- Looked for a common theme among those things.
- Came up with a list of words to summarize the theme.
- Chose my word.
I didn’t write it down or do anything fancy. I thought it through in my head, because that’s just how I process things. When I finally got to the last step, the word I chose for 2019 is:
I played in a cemetery when I was a kid. My friends and I were respectful of the graves while we played house claiming different plots as our “homes.” Loved it. So when I had the opportunity to go on a tour of Woodland Cemetery in Dayton, OH, I jumped at it.
This cemetery has as much beauty as history. Among many other famous folks buried there are Erma Bombeck, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the Wright brothers. That alone makes this a really interesting place. It also has around 3,000 trees and 165 specimens of woody plants. Oh, and it is considered one of the most haunted places in Dayton.
The theme of the tour was History, Mystery, Murder, and Mayhem. We heard about all sorts of people from inventors to murderers to robbers. The coolest thing was learning about people I hadn’t heard of before.
Who else is buried at Woodland Cemetery?
Rev. Lorennzo Lorraine Lanstroth, the father of modern beekeeping, is buried here. He lived in the 1800s and more than a century later, his beekeeping methods are still in use.