Looking Ahead
Life is funny. My great-grandmother, by whose house my house now stands, lived almost all of her life in this small Texas town where I now live. In fact, she died in the house next door while my youngest brother sat outside in 1968 and listened to his grandmother cry at the loss of her mother. It was the same year we lost our own mother. What a trying year for all. What’s strange to me, however, is that her husband, my great-grandfather, passed away in 1949, two years after my birth, and it felt to me as though he never existed. That he had lived and died in some long ago time. While it seemed my great-grandmother had lived for ages and had always been with me.
Now I know the truth of the matter as my own age gradually increases into numbers previously ignored or not considered, and I get to think about how I want to live my final years as though I have a choice in the number. Although, I guess, in a way, I do. At the moment, it feels as though I need to slow down a bit. Breath a little. Take in the scenery. Approach things much as I do when I’m on the trail and my legs are heavy. I’m on a long walk, and there’s no rush. So, I rest and take a drink.
Of course, I have a trip scheduled for this coming weekend. We’re heading to Lajitas for a week in Big Bend Country. But after that the schedule is relatively quiet. And maybe that’s the trick. I need to stop looking so far ahead, just take one short term step at a time, and let life come to me. And maybe this is the final break from my working life, where I lived mostly in the future, sometimes to the detriment of the present. I’ll work in the gardens with the spirit of my great-grandmother and see if we can’t get something to grow and let the seasons be my guide.