Creative Spark:

SUE BONEBRAKE

The first time I met Sue was in a barn full of animals. I’d arrived to interview her for a newspaper story on retirement and second careers. She and her husband, Sig, former high school teachers, were now in the business of raising alpacas.

Sue met Sig at Northwest Missouri State University where she was studying to be a teacher. They soon discovered they’d each had a poem published in the same copy of the Lyrical Iowa poetry anthology and that Sig’s poem had been Sue’s favorite. She took that as a sign. After a whirlwind romance that Sue recently chronicled in an essay published in Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Miracle of Love, they got married and had three children.

During their fifty years together, the two were always on the lookout for adventures. While they were still in college, they almost joined a national theater touring company, made plans to go into catfish farming, and briefly considered teaching on a reservation in Montana. When they lived in Sidney, Iowa, Sue worked as assistant director and did tech with a professional dinner theatre while Sig did tech and acted. Later, though both were teachers at the time, they did computer portraits and made homemade egg rolls on the NE Iowa fair circuit during summers. In 1991, Sue became director of a theater group that she ran for ten years. The two also taught English, speech, and drama at the high school I graduated from, Maquoketa Valley in Delhi, Iowa, for many years before their retirement.

“We were always up for adventure, doing things other people wouldn’t even think of doing,” Sue said, an understatement considering her husband had once been a trapeze artist.

The couple hadn’t planned on becoming alpaca farmers when they visited an alpaca farm in 2003. Looking forward to retirement, they’d had a brand-new house built. They’d only wanted to see in person the domesticated species of South American camelid Sue had heard about on late-night television commercials. When a colleague told them of a farm nearby, they planned a one-hour visit. They stayed for seven hours. When the farmer drove the herd to the barn, there was no sound. It was that silence that won them over.

“In high school, when the bell rings, it’s chaos—organized chaos, but it’s always loud,” Sue said. “When the herd of eighty alpacas ran past us on their way to the barn, there was no sound. I thought then that this would be heaven—you get out of a noisy school and there would be silence.”

They purchased a male and two pregnant females, boarding them for eleven months before they sold their new house in town and moved to an acreage in Earlville, Iowa, where they now raise alpacas and Shetland sheep. It actually didn’t surprise their children, who had grown up being involved in their parents’ many adventures. They just shook their heads and murmured, “There they go again.”

When Sue joined my lifelong learners group, it had been over fifty years since she’d had anything published. She hadn’t stopped writing the poetry that had brought her and her husband together—she just hadn’t submitted anything, the surest way to avoid rejection. But when she read one of her poems aloud, I was in awe of her obvious talent. With a little guidance and encouragement (and sometimes that’s all it takes), she was off, polishing poetry and prose pulled from her file folders. Once she took that first step, she admitted she couldn’t stop writing and submitting. It was as if a fire had been lit beneath her.

That fire continues to spread to other ventures in creativity. Though she has been taking painting lessons for five years, she recently began entering paintings in the county fair, as well as continuing with her photography, winning several blue ribbons in both categories.

“I don’t plan on stopping either,” Sue says. “Creative adventures keep life interesting.”