BARBARA SHARES HER STORY

Barbara loves the view out over the wide-open plains of eastern Colorado, watching the sun rise every morning and the moon rise every night. She lives with her beloved rescue dog, a three-legged dachshund she named Frank, in the town of Littleton, which lies more than a mile above sea level along the front range of the Rocky Mountains, so the view is pretty spectacular.

Now 77, Barbara retired 15 years ago from her career with the national forestry service, but if you think she’s a retiree just sitting around her home looking at the sun rise every morning, you don’t know Barbara.  She fills in her days doing what she calls “odds and ends” as a part-time customer service provider for a local store

“I’ve never been someone who just sits around doing nothing,” she explains in a voice conveying that this is a woman with a whole lot of energy. “Staying busy helps me keep learning different things, meeting interesting people.”  She adds for emphasis, “My advice is to just get out there and do something!”

In her life as an office manager with the Forestry Service out in the beautiful landscape of Colorado, Barbara frequently got out of the office, including making long drives into the Rockies delivering much-need supplies to base camps supporting the brave and exhausted men and women fighting fires burning the forests covering some of the most challenging places in America.

Even in retirement today, Barbara works at maintaining a healthy lifestyle, by keeping track of what she eats, walking the trails around her Littleton home when weather permits, or just going up and down the 18 steps inside her home three times a day.  In case you’re counting, that’s 36 stairs up and down, times three, or 108 stair steps a day.  Oh and by the way, that’s in a town that’s more than a mile high, a healthy dose of aerobics for anyone, especially someone in their Seventies.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Barbara also pays close attention to healthy brain function as she’s grown older.  She admits, “I was starting to forget the little things, like walking into a room and wondering why I was there.”  So she looked around for something to help her with a memory that was starting to slip a bit, as can happen with age, and she decided to try Prevagen.

“After I started taking Prevagen, I soon realized that my memory was improving,” she says. “Before taking Prevagen I would catch myself realizing I had forgotten something. I gave Prevagen a chance and I can tell the difference!”

For a person who has spent a lot of time taking supplies to firefighters, caring for her three-legged dachshund, doing odds and ends for customers at a local store, and walking up and down more than a hundred stairs a day in a town more than a mile above sea level, it probably should come as no surprise that Barbara also finds time to make sure she’s able to remember what she calls the “little things.”  Like why she just walked into the room.