the wall

I added to my collage wall today. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that. I’ve stepped into the last year of my ninth seven-year cycle….I move into the beginning of a new seven-year cycle next year. The base of this collage wall is a drawing made sometime in my forties, when my internal life resembled a trek in a fire-ravaged forest, no green visible anywhere. Atop that is life since then, anything that has attracted the magpie in me….pretty ribbon, words from friends, beautiful art cards or wrapping paper, a few photos. I can see it from where I work, and sometimes I’m amazed at all that’s pinned up there, amazed that I really no longer remember much of the fire.

I’m moving into an end game in this journey. I don’t write that to be dramatic, but to be soberly clear with myself. There may be less than one seven-year cycle left to me, or I may attain more. What do I want to do with this long or short season left? Health, for one thing, as I watch Alzheimer’s take my mother. A live Robert Earl Keen concert instead of just listening to the mix my son made for me, that’s another, but small. If it doesn’t happen, I won’t really care. I don’t long for foreign lands, but I do long for meaning.

Time for another bucket list, a deeper, gutsier one….what’s yours? What would make you say, today, today is a good day to die?

 

 

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looking good

Well, some things about getting older are absolutely fun. I just went to return my neighbor’s garage door opener, and he met me at the door in his boxers and T-shirt. The boxers had bright blue circles on them (and my neighbor is thinner than I thought). He wore a patch over the eye that has a glass eyeball in it to rest it, he told me. I can understand that. Let me add that I walked over braless, in a baggy dress and shirt, sunburned a vivid pink with hair upstyled by a day at the beach. (My husband and I added a tarp to his truck and sat on the beach like trailer trash.) My husband has taken to wearing kerchiefs and soft cap things to protect his balding head. Today he had on a blue cylinder of cloth made by National Geographic (proudly I was told this) that could be pulled over his face like a mask or pushed back and tucked in, as it was. He looked like an Aryan extra on a Pirates of the Caribbean shoot (see Johnny Depp). I no longer wear a bra. Refuse to, though I am–how shall I put this– abundantly endowed. I don’t care what Oprah advises, I’m not doing it anymore. It’s like armor at my age. And may I add (don’t read the rest of this if you’re visually sensitive), one of the girls hangs lower than the other. Last week, I walked out to get the paper, saw a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile and proceeded to talk with her for thirty minutes in an old T-shirt and pajama bottoms as the world drove by on its way to work. As Rhett said to Scarlett (let me know how many of you have no idea what this refers to), “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  I don’t. And apparently, others feel the same. That’s fun.

What don’t you give a damn about anymore? I hope there’s something…