Jim was in the hospital again for five days so I have had a lot of time to think, or more accurately dance around thoughts that have earned squatter’s rights in my brain. Jim & I have been in residence on this earth for about 160 summed years, best friends and lovers bound together for about 65 years. We really like each other and have a hard time imaging life without the other.
I have found that when I approached each new decade I would think about, plan for, the next ten years or so. We know a lot of people in their nineties who are still wintering in Florida and actively engaging in life. Our neighbor and friend, Dorothy, turned a hundred this year and was afraid she wouldn’t be able to come for two years because her condo was also flooded and rebuild was going slowly. We have some outstanding role models of people into their 80’s and beyond; but death has taken some friends and we see so many, many people of this age with drastically restricted life. And now Jim has had two hospitalization in the past four weeks that were life threatening. As Jim and I talk about our life together we touch on, every so often, the fact that life is precarious. But, yes, we want ten more years together. But, yes, we know that things happen.
The stress of the rebuild after our flooding from Hurricane Ian has also made it very obvious that “we’re not as young as we used to be.” That long, long list of really small tasks of moving back into our condo and doing the “home-making” hit us really hard with the realization that we have limited energy and can’t scurry around doing this, then doing that, while also taking care of whatever. So many things that we would have done in younger years, are now given to our contractor to add to the punch list of things for the workers to do for us and for us to hand over money. We knew this day was coming when we decided to build a new house 15 years ago instead of buying a condo. We decided we had enough money to hire things done when we got old and didn’t have the energy or desire. What we didn’t understand way back then was that having someone else do all those things takes away some of our purpose in living. How do we find meaning in life in our 80’s when so much has changed in our bodies?
One of the things I did during this last hospital visit, to calm us both, was to read poems to Jim from a book of Ted Kooser’s poems I purchased a while back. This is one of them.
Daddy Longlegs
Kooser, Ted (2018). Kindest Regards: New and Select Poems. Cooper Canyon Press. p. 34 (originally in One World at a Time)
Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,
a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill
that skims along over the basement floor
wrapped up in a simple obsession.
Eight legs reach out like the master ribs
of a web in which some thought is caught
dead center in its own small world,
a thought so far from the touch of things
that we can only guess at it. If mine,
it would be the secret dream
of walking alone across the floor of my life
with an easy grace, and with love enough,
to live on at the center of myself.
This could easily be my secret dream, to walk alone into the future with easy grace, maybe holding hands with Jim, to have enough love to live on at the center of myself. I know what is at the center of myself, that is firm and stable. I’m not so sure about the future of energy, bone and muscle. In my thinking, love isn’t solitary. Love is relationship and love is reciprocal. I need to figure out how to get body, mind and soul back in harmony with those around me today and in our tomorrows.
