Take the time to appreciate your wonderful life in Libby

As I watch the wonderful people post here on this site (The Western News Facebook page) I am reminded how blessed I am to have been a Libby resident for a time in my life. I lived there before I went to school and again when I was in high school. Though we moved a lot, pretty much each year, Libby was always my home in my heart. How could it not be?

My mother, Leota (Lee) Garrison was born and raised there and so was my dad, Duane “Dewey” Adamson. It’s where all my aunts and uncles lived, my grandparents lived there, too.

Everything I grew up seeing there make up my good memories of my childhood. When I read comments here under the fabulous photos that are posted, I am reminded what a special place Libby is for so many good people.

I find myself feeling a little jealous the wonderful relationships you all have with each other. Many people in Libby have had the privilege to be born and to grow old with the same people in their lives, sometimes with parents and grandparents who had the same experiences, sometimes in the same neighborhoods.

You may have grown up surrounded with cousins, aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandparents, great-grandparents— everyone within a quick drive of one another when they were needed for support or a quick cup of coffee. I cannot begin to share how special that is from someone who never had roots of that kind.

As this Christmas season fast approaches, I hope all of you who live in Libby or Troy and the surrounding areas take another look around at the pristine beauty you are constantly surrounded with each day you look out a window, drive up the gut, cross the bridge or just listen outside your own home.

When you go downtown, take a look back through your mind and see Libby through historical eyes, remind yourself of all the scenes you can remember looking down that gut. Take another long look at the family you have been given to live close to, the cousins you maybe don’t keep up with, the elderly relatives who have so much of our own history within them and probably need to share it.

The very town I thought boring as a teen, I would give anything to go back to and make a different decision to raise my children there. I now see Libby and all the extended family relationships as the Northwest’s kind of “Bedford Falls,” a place many good people have left for that “chance of a lifetime” that George Bailey sought.

I hope you find something extra special this year to make you appreciate Libby and your experience living there. I hope you find a new appreciation for the people who have blessed your lives from birth until now. I hope you find a new appreciation for living a little more calmly than most of the world gets to.

I hope, like George Bailey of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” you find that everything you’ve ever really wanted has been there all along. It was only you who perhaps didn’t realize it until now. What a blessed life is born into those lives whom Libby has touched.

Merry Christmas to all.