When? he asked. When does middle age end and old age begin?

"When" he asked, " when does middle age end and old age begin?"

It took awhile to recover from his question.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Ugly Week

For days I have been thinking about ugly week. I was 23 before I knew there was such a thing. Growing up on the wonderful Wet Coast I was oblivious to this blight. My first real winter was in the Interior but far, far out in the country so again - I didn't have a clue about ugly week.

One winter in the city in Ontario and I awakend to ugly week. To me it seemed like a month but it couldn't have been. All that lovely fluffy white snow accumulates over the winter. Grit is sprinkled on the roadways, litter is dropped, trash is spilled, garbage buried, pets eliminate and the streets elucidate tales of misdemeanors of a public and personal nature. It lays in wait layered on the roadsides and walks. Nasty, nasty, nasty! Sometimes a timely rain shifts the dust into shoals and leaves beds of sand in the gutters and at the road sides but other years it is fetid and dank and it lingers, slippery and sticky, to cling to rubber boots and grease the path of pedestrians.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Happy anniversary , happy anniversary

Just by serendipity I happened to notice that I have been here for 3 years TODAY!
Happy anniversary to me ! I'm sorry it took so long for you to find me here. At an average of 20 posts a year it's not an onerous task for you to keep up. I hope you'll be back soon.

The intent of the blog was to log some of the triumphs and many of the frustrations on the road to old age. I didn't think I'd done that but already as I read back I can see a few things that have changed in my life.

Friday, March 9, 2012

International Women's Day

Was yesterday and I wanted to say something of significance but I didn't although thoughts raced through my head all week long.

There is an undercurrent out there just as dangerous to women as an undertow to a swimmer. Challenges to abortion legislation, the ugly diatribe against insurance provided birth control, the notion that femnism is passe and that feminism is against something rather than for something are swirling about us. If young women look to their elders; to the grandmothers and grey haired women of their communities they will find that the past is not so distant and the freedoms they see as their birthright not so firmly entrenched. Most of the rights and freedoms today's western women take for granted came about little more than a generation ago. It was George Santayana that said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Let's hope that this is not the case.