By Regena Handy

Sometimes I think I was born a hundred years too late. Most of my life I’ve felt out of place and rather inept at existing in a ‘modern’ world. But then I have only to remind myself that in earlier eras such things as natural childbirth were the norm and that I’m also not good with pain.

I used to call myself ‘an old soul’ until I realized that its definition is generally referred to as reincarnation or having lived another life before this one. Since that isn’t part of my core beliefs, I guess I may instead just be an old fogey.

My brother perhaps described it best. It was our upbringing, he once said. While being raised in a loving, sheltered environment was the most tremendous blessing imaginable, it also meant we came of age incredibly naïve in so many ways. In his words, it was difficult to be raised as we were and have to go out and live in the real world.

Though my growing up years took place during a tumultuous time, its effect for the most part was indirect. Despite the fact that we were baby boomers whose generation led student revolts on campuses, women’s rights and civil rights movements, lived the counter-culture lifestyle of hippies, participated in demonstrations and peace sit-ins and anti-war protests, we were not involved. I didn’t know anyone who was part of such events.

It wasn’t until my older brother was drafted into the Army and my other brother became a student at Virginia Tech that the Vietnam War and the wide-ranging unrest on numerous college campuses and in the rest of the world became real and personal to us. Most of what we knew before that came from the TV screen or newspaper.  I mean, I never even heard of Woodstock until long after its occurrence.

Here’s how it was — I was raised like that of the generation before me, a life of party phone lines and outhouses, of wringer washers and hand-made dresses, of wood burning cook stoves and wood burning heaters. We drank milk from our own cows and water from the tin buckets brought from the spring, carrying enough to fill the galvanized bathtub, to wash and rinse clothes, and to fill the reservoir tank on the cook stove.

From the mid-sixties and into the seventies, much of this lifestyle began a gradual change but our existence from that earlier formative time has continued to make an impression on me. I find that I am more interested in history than current life and feel more aligned with my parents’ generation than my own.

Let me share a quote from an unknown source which addresses my own feelings. “For some old souls, the world feels alien. They find it hard to understand people, why such chaos and misery exists, and how it is allowed and sometimes encouraged to continue.”

I imagine there actually are a lot of what I persist in calling old souls out there in the world. Like me, they probably yearn for a time when values were more clearly defined and a life, while certainly not easier, seemed simpler to live.