family · My Thoughts · poetry

Let’s Celebrate My Birthday Today!

Featured Larada Horner-Miller
My baby picture - my birthday
My baby picture taken August 1953

Today is my birthday—I turned 68. Hard to believe! Will you help me celebrate?

Here’s a poem I wrote about the day I was born:

 
 “She Was Born Dancing!”
 On June 26, 1953, my folks left
 their thirteen-month-old son with Millie,
 the family babysitter,
 to go to a square dance in Trinidad,
 fifty miles away.
  
 Mom danced one tip that night—
 She was nine months pregnant
 with me.
 They left the dance early
 feeling something was about to happen.
  
 Early the next morning
 Mom had labor pains
 that made her stagger across the floor.
 It was time!
  
 The fifty-mile trip back to Trinidad
 and the hospital
 was made in record time.
  
 At 10:30 a.m. I was born.
  
 Dad went downtown
 and ran into a fellow dancer
 from the previous night.
  
 Dad announced his good news—
 a new baby girl!
  
 Remembering Mom at the dance
 the night before,
 the only comment the stunned friend
 had to make was,
 “She was born dancing!”

            Whenever my mom was alive, she made my birthday a special occasion. When I was a child, it was a party with all my friends and family and a birthday cake she decorated. Just inviting my cousins and family made a sizeable get-together.

4th birthday - my birthday
I’m the smirky one to the left with long curls!

As an adult, she continued to celebrate me on my day, making every year memorable. In 1983, when I turned thirty years old, Aunt Willie decorated a cake with one foot on a banana peel. My nephew carried in a watermelon for a gift (my favorite summer food). Then they gave me a gift of survival tools for being over the hill: my grandmother’s dentures, underwear and other key helping aides.

  • My Watermelon Birthday Present
  • Me in my Grandmother’s underwear

In 2012, Lin and I were at the National Square Dance Convention for my birthday, so Mom left me a voicemail wishing me a happy birthday. I kept that voicemail and recorded it on my iPad. After she died in 2013, I’ve started each of my birthdays off with playing it just to hear her voice and her greeting.

            In 2017, my brother and his two daughters were in Branson, Colorado, for my birthday. They have their grandmother’s birthday spirit, so they provided the props, and we took these photos to celebrate.

  • Me with all the props
  • Me and Lin
  • Me with my brother

Today I celebrate being 68 years old. My husband, Lin, made it a special day. He wrapped his gift a couple days ago and set it on the coffee table in the living room, enticing me to wonder about it.

Roses for my birthday
Bouquet Lin bought me for my birthday

            This morning a beautiful bouquet of roses and lilies greeted me when I came downstairs. Then he sang “Happy birthday” to me and encouraged me to open my gift immediately. He bought me a CD player to listen to during my Quiet Time. Mine died a couple months ago, and I was going to replace it, but. . .

            For breakfast, he fixed blueberry pancakes, and we played a couple games of Cribbage and I won—a gift he hadn’t planned.

My birthday cake today
Me with my birthday cake today

            Then after lunch, he put a “Birthday Girl” headdress on me and came in with lit candles on a carrot cake. He explained the lettering on the cake. He had bought a cake decorating tube and wrote my name in the middle but ran out of room, so the last A was underneath it. Then he successfully wrote “Happy” at the bottom, but he told me the tube malfunctioned so he couldn’t do “Birthday.” What a sweetheart!

Other family members helped me celebrate. This morning I received a text from my sister wishing me a happy birthday. This afternoon, I received a phone call from my niece and two of her children, my nephew and his two daughters, and my brother wishing me a happy birthday.

            Yes, today we celebrated in true Horner fashion. Lin, who celebrates so much like Mom, channeled her celebratory nature the whole day.

            Don’t stop celebrating birthdays, no matter how old you are—that special day when you were born! Do something outrageously fun and make it a day to remember! Lin and Mom always have!

            What do you do to celebrate birthdays in your family or with your friends? (Scroll down below to make a comment.)

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Published by Larada Horner-Miller

Larada Horner-Miller is a poet, essayist and accomplished multi-genre author who holds a bachelor’s degree in English, with a minor in Spanish and a master of education degree in Integrating Technology into the Classroom. She is the accomplished author of six award-winning biographies, historical fiction, memoir, and poetry works plus three self-published cookbooks. Her sixth book, Coronavirus Reflections: Bitter or Better?, is available in paperback and four e-book formats. Larada offers the reader the opportunity to look back at 2020 and the global pandemic through her prose and poetry through reading, then reflecting and responding. She addresses all the emotions she felt during this overwhelming time and leads the reader through to a self-access: bitter or better? Her fifth book is the authorized memoir and biography of world-renown square dance caller Marshall “Flip” Flippo. Just Another Square Dance Caller: Authorized Biography of Marshall Flippo is available now in hardback, paperback and four e-book formats. Recently Just Another Square Dance Caller won two awards: Book Excellence Awards Finalist and Silver award for eLit. Book Awards. Another recent book of hers, A Time to Grow Up: A Daughter's Grief Memoir has won many awards including being a 2018 Book Excellence Awards Finalist in the Memoir category at the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards and a 2018 Independent Press Distinguished Favorites Award in the Memoir category. Horner-Miller has also been a past national presenter at the Women Writing the West Conference and is currently the creator of Memoir Workshops for others who want to share their family’s legacies through words. Larada and her husband, Lin, enjoy being nestled in the mountains above Albuquerque, New Mexico, near the village of Tijeras. When not writing books, this passionate, energetic, and enthusiastic woman loves to spend time kicking up her heels at square dancing gatherings, traveling, knitting, and reading. As co-manager of her family’s southeastern Colorado ranch, she enjoys spending time exploring her family’s historic ranch and reminiscing with her brother and his children about their mom, dad, and granddad.

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