State of Mind

There, it's happened. I turned the corner. Yesterday was my seventieth year upon this earth. I'm seventy years old! True, it's true. I keep having to remind myself that this is a fact: I am now 70 years of age. Is this fair? Where, after all, have the years gone? Seems like a lot, yet on the other hand, is it really? These were certainly not sparse years. They were years of plenty. All the experiences, all the living done in those years, simply amazes me.

Guess what? Seventy? Can't believe it. There's the proof, if I want it. I have but to look in a mirror. There are times when the mirror is kind and it seems to me that I look well, like myself, not old. Assuredly not young either, but myself. Then there are those times when I just happen to fleetingly, without meaning to, look in a mirror and see not myself at all, but my mother looking back at me. Why she's there is beyond me. I don't recall summoning her, but she's there.

Age is also a state of mind, I know that. On the other hand age is most definitely a state of being, is it not? So, which is it? Both, yes, both. I'm back to doing my nightly exercises, that same set of exercises I've done for the past, let's see, about forty years. I had to briefly suspend them following my icy fall in the ravine, clunking my head a few weeks back. Those evening exercises keep me limber. As does my house cleaning. I've got a fairly youthful body; few aches and pains. So I'm certainly fortunate in that regard.

I've always appeared physically young for my age. A nuisance when one is young, but oh, so very nice when one becomes rather mature-beyond-mature. Our daily clambers in the ravine remain a challenge for the older we get the slightly more difficult those inclines and declines. I've got to stop briefly and rest for the minutest of times. Out of breath slightly, and occasionally more than slightly. It comes and goes.

Have I anything to complain about? Hardly. My husband is a month behind me. He'll catch up in a sense, soon enough, but I'm the older of we two. He has no need to stop and rest, but he kindly slows down and stands alongside me until my energy level feels restored. I don't have quite his stamina, and wonder if that's a gender thing, greater chest cavity, better lung capacity.

He made a lovely card for my birthday, and I treasure all those cards he has produced for me over the years. Gave me a facsimile of an old cookbook. Another of a gardening encyclopedia. And a third book, one about mountain climbing, and an introspective look at attempting to understand just why it is that so many people feel such an inner compulsion to climb the earth's highest and most dangerous peaks placing their lives at risk. He knows my fascination with that.

The best gift of all is having our younger son with us for these two weeks. And his gift to me arrived in the mail the day before my birthday; a lovely pottery bowl he'd made, a rose painted in its interior.