This is the most profound fact I’m finding at sixty: Life is “OR,” now, not “AND.”
I look at old letters and blog posts, and I think, “Life was
all AND back then.” I gardened AND grocery shopped AND blogged AND served a hot
lunch at school AND did minister’s wife duties AND flew to Minnesota regularly
to see my parents.
These days, it’s OR. I can garden OR host visitors OR travel
OR write. Not all the above.
Part of this is that my energy and brain capacity have
dimmed. The other part is that I feel a lot less obligated to keep the world
spinning. There’s not a lot of me, and I need to spend it carefully, choosing
an occasional “yes” while leaving a sea of “no’s” behind.
That is why I haven’t been active on Life in the Shoe since
June.
The last six months, beginning with the kids showing up at
that overlook on the Oregon Coast, have been crazy in a very good way.
First was the avalanche of celebrations. Then came summer
with the urgency of outside work like planting dahlias and trimming hedges. After
that came a flood of adventures.
My two sisters, Rebecca and Margaret, came to visit at the
end of August. I treasure them, and time with them, more and more all the time.
After that, on the fourth of September, a long-held dream
came true when three of my Smucker sisters-in-law and I traveled to the UK for
ten days.
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| Lois, Bonnie, Rosie, and me in front of a mirrored wall at Heathrow |
I had two weeks at home and was barely over the inevitable
jet lag when Paul and I left for Thailand to visit Amy. Paul was going to go on to India and Nepal to visit Open Hands savings group, but we both got Covid and our plans went completely sideways.
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| Paul and me at a temple near Chiang Mai |
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| Fabric shopping with Amy |
Now I am at home, once again in the cocoon of misery that is jet lag but planning to stay tethered here for a long time. The fall rains have begun, very delayed and welcome, so I might be able to post more, eventually, about all our travels.
So, as you see, I chose adventure and people over writing
blog posts. I also took a break from meeting with my fiction writing group and almost
all hospitality and time with friends, which was painful, but again, life is
very much OR at this stage.
I did, however, fit a couple of “ands” in between. My
dahlias survived a late planting and sporadic attention from me, and now they’re
exploding into bloom like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
I also assembled a book of essays to finish out the series
of books on family life that I’ve been collecting from my newspaper articles
for almost twenty years. This one contains a number of columns from the paper
that never made it into a book, along with other material I wrote around the
same time, roughly five years ago.
During a long layover in Seoul, Korea, I finished the edits
on the book and sent it off to a proofreader, which felt like the ultimate
attempt at “and”—trying to make a deadline while traveling overseas.
We still have a number of steps to complete, such as
formatting, cover design, and printing. It looks like launch will be in March.
To answer your questions before you ask them: The title isn’t
finalized, so I’m not announcing it. This is not fiction—that is still
percolating. And it’s not about Paul’s accident—I’m not ready to put that on
paper. It’s about life past age fifty, with adult children. And because they’re
adults now, I see this as the final book of essays about family life, because I
can no longer write about them in the same way or pay them $5 to let me mention
something funny or dangerous they said or did.
The fact that I’m writing again, in several different
venues, testifies to a good work happening in my life. The last three years
have been wild and difficult, beginning with my dad’s death and careening on to
Covid, Paul’s accident, deaths and disasters around us, and many private griefs
and challenges.
Eventually, by God’s mercy, spring came, my brain thawed, and
the words trickled like a tiny stream of melted snow in the high Cascades.
I am excited about being sixty years old, about the possibilities and opportunities before me, and about “bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God.” [Colossians 1:10]
If life forces
me into “OR” mode rather than “AND,” I hope to choose wisely and make the most of
whatever I pick.
