When Insider was a kid he used to occasionally sit in the kitchen and watch his grandmother toast flour. To this day he doesn’t know shy she did that. She did it in a cast iron frying pan, slowly and carefully. Constantly stirring with a spatula, she toasted the flour until it was a dark golden brown, then emptied the results into a Mason jar and placed it atop the stove. Her kitchen stove was never without that jar of gold. What was it for? What did she do with it? Does anyone know?
So we had a couple of good snows this winter. That means the crops will be good this summer. They call snow the poor man’s fertilizer. Or at least that’s what the trusty old Farmer’s Almanac says.
There ought to be a law calling for all young people to be married at the age of 16. That way the love and romance crap, plus the compulsory two children, can be gotten out of the way while there is still time to start over again for all the right reasons. Let’s face it. We are all living too long for any young marriage to last. Anyone who gets married before they are 30 is flirting with disaster and doesn’t stand a chance to actually be happy as far as love goes. The fact is there’s still too much time to change.
Insider remembers going through a lot of changes in his 20s. He had a bunch of different jobs, returned from the service with a huge chip on his shoulder, dated a lot of ladies, ate a lot of bad food, watched a lot of bad movies, took a lot of bad advice, embraced many friends and some enemies and traveled a bunch. He did not know who he was then. He had no identity. He was trying to find out what he wanted to do with his life, bouncing from job to job, while also figuring out where he wanted to call home. The old guy did not how he stood politically either, recalling on at least three occasions sending in paperwork to switch his voter registration from one party to another, and waffling between strong viewpoints on issues of the day.
With so much uncertainty as to their true identities, it’s understandable why so many of these joint ventures, officially called marriages, end in divorce and families being torn apart. It’s easy to avoid, and Insider tells all his family members the ideal marriage age is 35-40. Two mature people, well established, with the kids raised and out on their own, is a marriage combination that should last a lifetime.