After 30 years practicing as a veterinarian in upstate NY, Laura Tenney’s retirement strategy starts with music. She’s back to playing her flute, and she performs with two community bands. She must have an extra large music stand, because her concert programs include traditional marches, symphonic band pieces, Broadway and jazz. She’s thrilled to be playing with others, and especially to have found a way to be creative.
Finding ways to be creative – at work or retirement, in art, in the kitchen, in music – is a recurring theme among our classmates. Another recurring theme is giving, and Laura’s doing that, too. She visits libraries, schools and nursing homes with her therapy dog, Angus. If you’ve ever seen the way a therapy dog can light up someone’s face, you know how fulfilling this is.
Having retired from her long career as a veterinarian, Laura is now playing flute again, helping out on the family farm in upstate New York, and working some personal magic with her therapy dog, Angus.
Laura’s husband Gerry and her son Jack are farmers, and now she’s playing a larger role helping out. They have about 250 head of Angus and Charolais cattle in a “cow/calf” operation. They raise cattle as well as all their corn, oats, sorghum and hay on the farm. For a special treat on Friday nights they give the calves a ration of brewer’s grains – a by-product of local beer production.
I smiled when she described a 21-year-old's desire to make farming a career. Like young farming friends of ours on the Front Range of Colorado, “he loves all the machinery you get to drive!” It’s a hard-working life, but with big engines everywhere – and these days, cool drones to fly over the fields to monitor weeds and soil condition – it has its rewards. As Laura says, this new chapter of her life is off to a great start – for everyone in her family!