Saturday night we’ll celebrate the ending of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. Time seems to be passing faster as I age. Things crossing my mind that I think happened a year or two ago are actually five or ten years in the past.
Every morning while I’m eating breakfast, I hear the clock on the wall ticking away the seconds. It makes me think about how we as older people are spending our time. Raising families and working at jobs are behind us, leaving more leisure to do the things we want to do. For example, our friends, Joyce and Sid, who enjoy socializing, join others playing euchre several afternoons a week at nearby senior centers.
My husband, Ken, who left law enforcement behind after serving for 37 years, is a farmer at heart. Each spring, he plants a large garden in our backyard. He places his surplus fresh vegetables on a picnic table for others to help themselves.
Our daughter, Lisa, a former trooper who spent duty shifts patrolling Illinois highways, volunteers several days a week to drive area veterans to appointments with doctors at the VA Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin.
My favorite painting was done by my cousin, Doris, when she took an art class after retiring from delivering the U.S. mail in rural areas. Her 16 x 20-inch picture is copied from a black and white photo taken on a threshing day at their farm eighty years ago. With a backdrop of the yellow, straw stack, I’m the four-year-old wearing a red dress and sitting on the spring seat in an orange wagon pulled by my uncle’s brown team, Adam and Eve. Dad is climbing into the wagon. Although he’s wearing a blue, work shirt and bib overalls exactly the same as the other farmers, I recognize his back view by the way he cocked his straw hat.
Since my memoir, The View from a Midwest Ferris Wheel, was published by Adelaide Books, a New York firm, I have been posting every Wednesday to my blog, lolita-s-bigtoe.com. I agree with Elizabeth Gilbert, best known for her narrative, Eat, Pray, Love, who says, “Writing is not like dancing or modeling; it’s not something, where–if you missed it by age 19–you’re finished. It’s never too late. Your writing will only get better as you get older and wiser.”
Priscilla Long, a poet and writer who is nearing age eighty, has a new book, Dancing with the Muse in Old Age. It’s an anti-ageist manifesto that debunks the myth of peak creativity from ages 39-42 with inspirational anecdotes about writers, artists, scholars and athletes who work long into their 90s…and beyond. I’m looking forward to reading it.
How are you planning to spend your time in this new year?