Right now I don’t know where I’m going. Or when. I only know that sometime I will leave this house and the planet, and there is a whole lot of stuff that won’t be going with me. I accept that. It is getting ready to leave things behind that gets to me. Some of my […]
Category: Aging Gracefully . . . or Not!
“Aging gracefully” takes some honest thought and may never really apply to me, but I’m working on it!
Stacking Points with In-laws
We all can use a sure-fire way to please our in-laws. As I got ready for Thanksgiving, I smiled while I polished the silver and remembered my guaranteed way to please my mother-in-law, Alice. Contrary to common stereotypes, my husband, Michael, didn’t marry a woman who is anything like dear mom. Alice’s household was always […]
Five Globs of Clay
Most of us want to avoid memory care. It’s typically not a place to enjoy enlightenment, but with help from five little globs of clay, it was the place where my mother found peace. Mom was from a generation of women who often lacked straightforward power in their lives, so they maneuvered. When reality didn’t match […]
Old Age Hitchhiking
As we age, we fade. It may be unwelcome, but it isn’t a surprise. Along the way to kaput, most of us want to remain true to our values. As health, mental capacity or whatever escapes our grasp, we want to live well, or correctly, or faithfully, or whatever distills the essence of our best […]
1,008 Steps of Compulsion
Sunday is the end of my Fitbit week, and this morning I looked at my record of steps for the week and noticed that I could push my little step count into six digits. That would be a personal record since my kids gave me a FitBit nine months ago. A lot has happened in […]
My Current Job
I have a new job. It is called being old, and it is a full-time position. Degeneration and decrepitude contribute to the time consumed by aging, but sometimes it is just an issue of being born during a much earlier era. Today I tried to figure out why my calendar doesn’t sync between my phone and […]
Aging Order of Operations
We don’t get to pick the order of operations as we fade or explode into deteriorations or setbacks. Since having every part of us go kaput would be a critical system failure, most of us try to manage these sub-system breakdowns with some grace while we work to improve or accept whatever crappy situation our […]
Adult Coed Slumber Party
The golf season is in full swing in the northwest, so Michael is often out of town volunteering as a golf rules official. Although there is very little about his gig that I can relate to, I get a lot of inspiration from his commitment to the players and those crazy rules. Michael used to […]
Rejected Angel
There are times in an old woman’s life where you can “roll with the punches” or “not sweat the small stuff.” I try to do that whenever I can. Until I couldn’t. It was IKEA that set me off. A few weeks ago I went to my local store to get UNICEF Christmas cards. When I […]
Tribal Exile
When I mentally bailed out of the church I’d devoted my adult life to, I lost my tribe and a chunk of the person I’d been taught how to be. I’d put a lot of energy into local congregations, so my self-imposed exile left some holes in my heart. The widest gap comes from losing […]