Isabel Simmons, who lives at Junction Creek Nursing Home, will celebrate an important milestone on August 31
Isabel Simmons, front center, here with her son Ian Simmons, front right, and staff at Junction Creek Health and Rehabilitation Center in Durango on Wednesday, celebrates her 101st birthday on Aug. 31. (Matt Hollinshead/Durango Herald)
Isabel Simmons is proud to have lived a long, rewarding and fulfilling life.
As she now prepares to turn 101, she has countless memories of her numerous international travels and her 30-year career as a nurse, times that have brought her joy and adventure.
Simmons, who lives at Junction Creek Health and Rehabilitation Center in Durango, will celebrate this major milestone on August 31.
Born in northern Scotland, she was an avid hiker, ate healthily, traveled to different parts of the world and had a long, influential career as a nurse.
She did a lot of hiking in Switzerland and Austria and even visited France, Italy, India and Haiti. Much of her international travel began when she began her nursing education in Glasgow, Scotland and continued in London. In 1957, she moved to the United States to pursue her career as a nurse and that passion for seeing the world continued even after she started a family.
“I liked the other people and didn’t mind (the change),” she said of her move to the U.S., adding that she was happy with her job.
She passed on her “openness” to adventure to her three now grown children, Charles, Isabel and Ian, whom she raised in Fort Lee, New Jersey, while working at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in nearby Manhattan, New York.
Ian Simmons takes his mother, Isabel Simmons, back to her room at Junction Creek Health and Rehabilitation Center in Durango on Wednesday. Isabel Simmons will celebrate her 101st birthday on Aug. 31. (Matt Hollinshead/Durango Herald)
Simmons said she enjoyed working as a nurse because she cared about helping people and enjoyed helping doctors before surgeries.
Simmons, who gave up nursing in 1987, helped children with brain tumors and later worked as a midwife. As a child, Ian Simmons says, his mother was a “tough, strict nurse.” She taught him how to take his blood pressure and treat wounds.
“She was an independent, career-oriented person,” he said.
Simmons, who lived in New Jersey for over half a century, also enjoyed seeing all the tall buildings and people in New York City.
Although she grew tired of commuting between Manhattan and the city and it eventually cost her her job, her love of travel remained.
“I think we all got the travel bug from our mother,” says 59-year-old Ian.
The younger son left New Jersey in 1983 for California before moving to Seattle to continue school and begin his work with the Peace Corps in South America, where he continued his mother’s passion for travel. After two years with the Peace Corps, he landed in Albuquerque in 2000 and moved to Durango in 2008, where he has lived ever since. On Mother’s Day 2021, he helped his mother move to Durango.
Aside from spending her remaining years near her son, Simmons said she enjoys nature, the “different” trees and the blue skies of Colorado – the latest of the beautiful memories she has collected over the past century.
