Not For Cissy's

Getting older isn't for cissy's. 'Cissy'  in the film 'Quartet' quoted this several,times, because she was growing   forgetful, adding an extra layer of poignancy.

I am sixty-three, and it's getting to me. I noted, and decided to remember, the first  time I groaned when attempting to get up from the floor. I was forty-two years old. I recall this as it occured to me mid-groan the other day, that I now ooh or  aah  (and sometimes both) going down too. So I have decided to go to the doctor and get it made official. Middle-age has sailed off into the sunset and old age has grabbed the tiller. 

I don't care. I'll go on Tuesday and sign up for a hip replacement and a test for gluten intolerance, and I'll carry on doing what I do as cheerfully as I can until  the Guy With A Sythe calls a halt. 

You may wonder what has brought about this broadcast of sailing and harvesting metaphors that skirt so amiably around the topics of decrepitude and death.

 I went on another Retreat. 

Last year's Retreat was a Death Party when I decided to write my Demise Agenda and Fumeral Plan. Well, I kind of got round to the first with a 'switch me off after 12 weeks no matter what' doc., but the funeral is yet to be completed: partly because only six of the obligatory attendees will know the hymns, so it needs more work. Ha! If it gets no further, I shall file it away as my 'Unfinished Sympathy'. (Hohoho -I bet someone got there before me with THAT one.)

This weekend's retreat was entitled, 'The Vulnerable Heart' and was an introduction to a series of meetings for women. Well, some women were a bit put out - why should women need  their very own agenda? I say, Humph, don't worry, you put vulnerability out as a topic, and I bet no men will come anyway, but I was told, ascerbically, that wasn't the point. Besides it was unfair. Sorry, men. 

I love everything about my life. I embrace it's joys and sorrows with equal energy, making them do what they are intended to do, to let me know that I'm alive, to help me to understand that nothing is permanent, and to prepare me for the last stage of my earthly journey before I die. 

But that's some way off yet. The twinges, the gripes, and the growing pile of pills to lower this, and ginger up that,  are not so big a deal.

Today I walked in bluebell carpeted woods, ploughed through mud, followed the twists of a fast-flowing river, and stopped to listen to birds. On the way home, I called in  to take tea with one of my daughters, and I played with my grandchildren.  I came home thinking:

However it ends- it was worth it. 

The Green Lane

I walked slowly home from babysitting Abigail this morning.

When the weather's good, and the ground underfoot, dry, I walk the green lane. It is an extension, in it's way, of Bury Barr Lane out of Newent. It was, a century or so ago, I suspect, the cattle-rutted Drovers' Road to Gloucester. It's now beleaguered and set about on all sides by the new housing developments, whose faux-rural names I have mercifully forgotten.

Rubbish is frequently tipped over into this cool green tunnel - garden waste, knackered lawn mowers and non-functioning kitchen appliances - by the sort of people who would do that sort of thing. All of which is regularly 'disappeared' by the sort of people who wouldn't.

Yes, a cool, green, tunnel. A hundred yards of retreat. A multi-sensory experience of the wildwood fringe, that would be difficult to recreate today.

The sun is finally warm. I think of my hat, hanging, forlorn, in the cupboard under the stairs, and wish it wasn't. I stop to chat to a twittering grey squirrel and again, to let the birds have their say too. I note where the bluebells will burst open next week, and admire the golden riot of lesser celandine, reflecting,in their blowsy way, the glory of the sun-shining . (Even when it's not.) By mid-May, St. Anne's lace will be waste high and peppering the air with a pale cream scent from it's flamboyant parasols.

I'm savouring this. I let all that I see, and hear, and smell and feel, coalesce into a memory of a beautiful morning, in late Spring. One that I will recall over and over again when memory is all I have left.

I don't walk alone.

Flash died today. I wrote of Flash last year ('Bumping Into Flash'). That guy could spin a yarn so incredible that you might think that no-one could believe it but me. His scrapes with the law, which he held in contempt, featured the longest chases, the most spectacular escapes, the most unlikely outcomes... . No one DID believe them but me.

Dirty heroin? Vodka and pills? The streets are rife with rumour. It hardly matters. He was careless, and now he's dead.

I walked the green lane with Flash this morning. A hundred yards of retreat.