CHANGE
As I sort out boxes of letters and other memorabilia I am caught in the past and feel both the intensity of good times in the past and feel sadness that all good times are gone.
I am realizing more and more that old age is a time of huge, often rapid fire, changes. The people I have cared about most in my life are gone, starting with Kathe, my wife, who died almost four years ago in May. She wanted very much to buy this house which had been lived in by the German American Rath sisters when they moved out in the late 1980’s. This was her dream house and we lived her together for thirty years with its wonderful view in front and walking trails behind on Jone’s Mountain. She decorated the house but I discovered with time that I like decorating as much as she did and together we filled the house with objects and paintings that meant something to us.
It is those objects and paintings from around the world that I am taking with me to Capitola in Marshall along with Kathe’s presence, which will always be with me.
But her death is just one of the huge transitions in my life. Moving to Marshall is another one. And every year people that I care about die. Every year I slow down and it is a little more difficult to travel. Health is a huge issue in your 80’s as my friends move to walkers in retirement homes where they will transition from larger to smaller apartments and on to assisted living and longterm (usually short) care. The huge transitions ahead, and not far ahead, are loss of mobility or loss of memory with the loss of both the past and the future.
Children, every year, live in a new reality as they shift from one life stage to another. And then there is that long time for many of us of middle age with becoming entwined and settled as we nurture families and settle into work roles in which things seem steady or at least steadier. And then comes the sudden transition of being empty nesters, then losing a spouse, then passing away of the people and things we love, and the rapid fire transitions before death.
Children are adapting and have to be adaptable, but us old folks who often are set in our ways, have to be just as adaptable as one unexpected transition dislocates us again and again until we are worn out and ready to go.
So this move, which seems so huge now but will be over in a couple of months, is just one more of these transitions. After Kathe died in my mid 80’s I transitioned to month long trips overseas every few months, flying freely. Now I am shedding my possessions, almost like shedding a skin, and leaving behind a great deal but still looking forward to new adventures. But who knows what is coming. Being old, it turns out, is being adaptable, and accepting great change again and again until the final transition.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 