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Tin and I drove to Franklinton today to change the flowers on my mother’s grave and go to my cousin once removed’s wedding reception. Along the way, we stopped in to see my uncle who just got finished rebuilding my grandmother’s original house off the Old Choctaw Trail. As we walked through the newly built house, I tried to remember the footprint of the old house. The floors were gorgeous – all refurbished planks from the original and worn like an old copper penny. The views out each room are trees and bushes and somewhere surely my grandmother’s spirit and laughter hover over the entire place even though she spent her last years in a trailer across the holler because the house had come into such disrepair.

Then we headed to my cousin’s son’s wedding reception – he’s so handsome and he managed to find someone equally as cute as he is and they seem adorably happy and young. Oh my god, are they young? As I tried to count up just how old they might be – 21? or slightly older, I sat with my uncle who said to me, “Getting older isn’t what I thought it would be.” He’s had an emotional setback that has sent him wandering the country – rudderless, rootless – he said here doesn’t feel like home.

Yes, indeed. Getting older isn’t what I thought it would be. I thought at this point in my life, I would have grown children and be looking towards retiring in the next decade. Instead, my income is starting at zero, my child is not even five years old, and I am one tired gal. Sleep is my greatest reward and what I covet oh so much these days.

While Tin and I were sitting on the side of my mom’s grave, Tin asked me to play Usher’s Yeah for Mimi, but instead I put on Deacon John singing Many Rivers To Cross, which is what he sang at the graveside when we had my mom’s memorial in 2010. I sat there on the warm granite, Tin in my lap, feeling the sunshine warm the slight chill that was in the air and I thought back to that year, the year after my mother had died and my son had come into my life, the year I was baptized by fire – my livelihood was slipping away, my health deteriorating, my grip on what I thought my life would be was firmly unraveling.

Joseph Campbell said we have to be prepared to give up the life we had planned for the one that awaits us. And no my dear, this is not at all what I thought old age would be – it’s different, nutty, volatile yet tranquil and if I had to say definitively, rather than moaning about what it is not, I’d say it’s better than I could have imagined.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 26th, 2013 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.