Sitting on my porch just now, and I have to diverge to describe the view: My porch is small, about ten feet wide and 6 feet deep. The floor is dark gray flagstone. I have a wooden, park bench style seat, a bistro table and two wrought iron chairs. Directly in front, and indeed reaching into the porch is a sturdy, youthful holly that I planted when it was 7 inches tall. It is now far above the roof and waves cheerily at me when I come out. Behind the holly is the 'oldsters.' They are five of a total of about 25 original trees from when the house was built 75 years ago, maples and an oak plus a few self planted berry trees in the back yard along the fence.
There is a pea pebble path to my porch that curves gently like a cheek. Alongside it are several plants whose names I don't remember with hand sized leaves that are rust colored on onesie and mustard colored on the other. There are a dozen small evergreens that I planted, always as small plants under a foot tall, which are now roof tall and above. We have grown up together.
A friend sent me a video of a hike she took yesterday in the woods, which were blooming with mountain laurel; I think she said it was the orange trail. Anyhow I was filled with melancholy for a lost love. I LOVED the woods, and I could feel intoxicated by the fragrances, my favorite being hot sun on pine needles. The big stillness filled with the riffling activity of the air in the leaves, the small and soothing sounds of birds or geese. These are gone from me now.
It isn't just the car being so old and untrustworthy, my knees are shot and so is my eyesight, and so I must reconcile myself to the change which has come about. Aside from being isolated by the pandemic, I am isolated by the onset of my personal aging experience. Turns out, as strong and active as I was, I am not the noteworthy oldy who competes in contests of fitness for the elderly.
My cartilage wore out. It is a fact I have to face every day in every way. So I can remember with love my years of hikes in the woods, the Maurice River Bluffs, the Cranberry Trail, Oswego, Atsion, Parvin, and my most beloved of all Pakim Pond. But I can't hike them anymore and with this car, I can't drive there either, and by the time I get a new car, my eyesight might be so bad I won't be able to drive there.
This is a new book. I feel as though, once again, I have walked out of a book in the series that is my life, and just opened the cover of yet another volume. There was the book of my childhood in the brick row home canyons of South Philadelphia, the book of my teens in Maple Shade and at Merchantville High School, my married life and the years in Germany, my motherhood years, my big freedom of late middle age retirement, and now the new and final volume in the series: Old Age.
My roots are coming in white. I am letting the style and color of my hair salon days grow out. All of this is fairly familiar to me as I was a watchful child and adult and I watched my parents age and die. I watched my mother's chestnut hair give way to commercial coloring, then wave the white flag of surrender. My mother went white in her 60's. My father kept something like a faded version of his golden platinum into his late 60's and finally subsided into a pale whitish color. I watched his knees go bad, her back. I saw their prodigious, unusual level of energy run out like a battery in a flashlight. All of these things that I witnessed, I now experience.
I may not have noticed so completely if I hadn't been in isolation for these past three months. It gives you plenty of time to think and to feel, things that the distractions of social life both protect and deprive you of.
Lately I have been feeling the tiniest flicker of inspiration to make a painting of the view from the porch.
Happy Trails,
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com
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