FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: NEW BEGINNINGS

Jean Bell Mosley's new autobiography, "For Most of the Century," is only available in serialized form in the Southeast Missourian. Return each week for her continuing story.

"New beginnings" is a phrase dear to my heart and I was glad to hear Reagan say it to the nation.

I experienced the exhilarating sensation afforded by a new beginning when first I learned that if I made too many mistakes and smudgy erasures on a sheet of tablet paper, I could tear it off and begin anew.

Although I was trained to make my tablet paper last (A tablet cost 5 cents) if on a page I had added eight plus eight to be fourteen, or the alphabet to read, abecd, etc., I could tear the page off and begin again on a fresh, unmarred page.

Finding the exact words to describe the sensation afforded by a new beginning is difficult. Maybe exciting, energizing, sense of cleanness will come close. One feels a curious airiness as if having dropped wearisome, heavy baggage in order to skip lightly along the path of new ideas, new inspirations, new goals.

Long ago I began making little booklets, all of which were entitled, "New Beginnings." I folded typing paper crosswise, sewing machine stitched along the fold. These were always designed for a forty day period. Why? Perhaps because forty days is a Biblical number. Maybe I felt that I could sustain anything for forty days.

Many times I didn't.

Typical "new beginning" goals, often repeated were:

1. Consider each new day a big, fat dazzling gift from God.

2. Quit presenting to the world a facade that is not really me.

3. Be more patient with people whose dreams are not my dreams.

4. Write a cheerful note to someone every day.

5. Always remember the day God talked back.

6. Read more in the Great Guidebook that says:

"Behold, I make all things new."

"Get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit."

"Be ye renewed by the renewing of your mind."

"I have set before you an open door."

These little booklets can still be found stuck in between books on the shelf or maybe in the books.

They testify to the fact that I did not always stay with my forty day effort. I suspect, though, that if I could find a suitable number of them and calculate where I quit before the forty day period, I would find more "kept" days than "unkept." And maybe three days after I had "strayed away" I began a new one!

I believed so thoroughly in Thoreau's statement, "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

In the 1980s decade, nearly all my little forty day New Beginning booklets have an entry saying: "Write something every day for your autobiography."

Thus, this book has taken shape.

Home

By the time the 1980s arrived I was so lovingly rooted to my little brick home I felt it to be a part of me, somewhat like a turtle and his shell. Not that I couldn't get away from it, but, oh, the sweet knowledge that it was there to come back to after having been out relating to the world's many facets of living -- discussing, agreeing, objecting, purposing, explaining, helping, hindering, forgiving, and generally responding to a thousand stimuli.

How comforting to feel the old, familiar doorknob in my hand, to give it a twist and once again be home.

Home is a place that has never been definitively described, for it means so many different things to different people.

Home is where the heart is, say some. Home is the place you hang you hat. Home is where, if you go there, they have to take you in. So go the many attempts at describing a home.

One of my dictionaries gives eleven definitions. The fourth one suits me, "An environment or haven of shelter, of happiness and love."

In the farm days, we once had a horse, Russell, who was willing to pull the buggy alone for long distances away from home, or the big farm wagon with a teammate, but the minute, on the return journey, at day's end, when he entered a certain area where he sensed familiarity, he began to trot faster and faster, to throw his head back and shake his mane, his nostrils flaring as if to inhale every wisp of some well-remembered odor.

By the time we got to the last long hill leading up to his home, the barn, there was no checking his haste, no matter how much we pulled back on the reins or how much his more lackadaisical teammate objected. We always left the barnyard gate open when out with Russell for fear he'd jump the fence gate, buggy or wagon and all, in his eagerness to get back to his "home of shelter and happiness."

Unhitched, he would quiver with seeming delight beneath the curry comb and turn to look at us often with his great, liquid, brown eyes as we rubbed him down. Entering his stall where corn and hay awaited, he would make soft velvety whinnies that spoke of utter comfort and peace. There would be answering whinnies down the row of stalls. He had been out in the sharp-edged world and had returned home to smell the combined odors of cracked corn, hay, leather harness, cow stalls on the other side of the partition and the pungent manure pile itself, to hear the soft moos and neighs and the clucking of a few laggard hens as they hurried for the twilight hen house.

I think of Russell often as I pull away from the complexities of the modern highway near eventide, round a curve fairly fast, go past familiar houses, yards, trees and shrubs even faster, a la Russell, to squeak the car's brakes and turn into my own driveway.

Whatever neighbor's dog or cat may be there to greet me as I go up the walk, I stop to greet it too, a rub here, a pat there. If the neighborhood children are still out playing in their yards and see me, they shout a greeting. Street lights are coming on as if to lengthen the day.

Inside the house, tension drops away as if I'm shedding an old, heavy, ill-fitting coat. My out-in-the-sharp-edged world clothing is replaced by my in-home, softly lined garments. My feet wriggle comfortably as they feel the change from tight leather to fuzzy lined slippers and my body quivers deliciously with comfort as did Russell's hairy hide. I might even whinny or make some suitable purring sounds with home-sweet-home contentment.

Once, in the midst of the holiday family reunion meal, when there was a lull in the conversation, Lillian, with no lead-into conversations, looked around and said, "I wish everyone had a home."

We continued eating in silence, each one, no doubt, thinking of those who might not be so lucky. Mentally I reviewed the dictionary definitions of home. Does "environment or haven of shelter" cover an out-of-the-wind doorway? Or lying on a sidewalk grate for warmth in the wintertime?

Some of the homeless may say, yes, they are familiar places, a hub which one can return to and look out on the spokes of his world. Still, I'm sure Lillian's wish and mine, too, is for everyone to have a home with walls and a roof, warmth in cold, shelter from the rain and especially an at-home feeling in the universe wherever he or she may be at gentle twilight times.

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.