This week’s blog challenge prompt is “Write about what you would do if you had to unplug from your devices for an entire day.”

So… like life before (for me) 1992?

For my brother it would have been more like life before 1981 or 1982, because he had his hands on his first computer with Atari cassette drive waaaaay before anyone else I personally knew. That boy was never “unplugged” from that day forward for more than a few hours. As soon as he was done with work (back when it was food service before he broke into the tech field), he was set up in front of his monitor and keyboard, with a few breaks to perch at his drum kit. He tried for many years to get me to try the pleasures of computing, and I strongly resisted until the early 90s. Even then, the best he managed was getting me to use computers for drawing and writing with a little desktop publishing thrown in; I never developed a taste for the programming side like he did. Numbers and formulas, eww…

What on earth did I do with all of my free time back then if I wasn’t tap tap tapping on a computer? Or doom scrolling on a phone? I didn’t even jump on the cordless landline phone trend until 1997, and that was because I had a c-section and leaping up to go answer a phone in another room was agony. My kids all had smart phones long before I did. Don’t worry, I’m all caught up now–sort of. I’ve never had a tablet or smart watch, and my laptop is 13 years old and takes an hour to boot up, so it hasn’t been resurrected for over a year.

Cats. I always had cats around to keep my hands occupied. If I was bored, I went outside and found a cat–we always had a dozen or more roaming around the farm. I would sit on a chair on the patio and have one or more on my lap, or I would lie in the grass in the front yard and 5 or 6 of them would pile on top of me and we would watch the clouds drift by and listen to the doves coo and the sparrows chirp and the owls hoot. The wind would gust up and rustle the grass and the leaves in the trees would almost tinkle like bells. Sometimes a dirt devil would whip past and almost knock a cat off my chest, but they would dig in their claws and readjust themselves once the mini tornado had swept by.

We almost always had a gravel pile sitting just inside the fence separating the cattle pasture from the driveway. I would climb up on the gravel pile and sit and sift through the rocks looking for pretty ones. There was a lot of agate and jasper, but sometimes I would get lucky and find what my dad called a Kansas diamond. I don’t know what it really was. It was a small, opaque frosty blue stone that had smoothed, tumbled edges.

If I didn’t mind getting wet, we would trek across the road to the Saline River. We crawled through the barbed wire fence and followed tire tracks through the tall grass and yucca plants to the river bed. We climbed over fallen trees and walked on shale beds, looking for fossils. In the summer, we went up to the quonset (big metal workshop) and grabbed a couple inner tubes and aired them up and then floated up and down the river.

If I had to stay indoors, then I was either reading or drawing. I always had a pile of books to read. Biographies, mysteries, and music magazines were my main genres. And I always kept a sketchbook and pencils nearby. Sometimes I would throw colored pencils or markers into the mix. My preferred subject matter was people, but I also drew cats and rarely landscapes. It was all mostly from my imagination.

These days I am not nearly as “plugged in” as many people. I do always have my phone with me so I can quickly research whatever I need to know on my “mini computer”, and so my family members and doctors can reach me. I always have text and email notifications pinging away in the background. If I need to kill time, I scroll through Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Tiktok. I use YouTube for how-to videos. Most of my book purchases are downloaded to my Kindle so I can take it to longer appointments. I never did get into gaming like many of my peers; my kids are gamers of varying levels, but I don’t join them.

And I still always have a cat on my lap. So some things never change.