September 16, 2020
Ah, the vagaries of the aging human when it comes to the art of remembering…anything.
I recall a time, must have been a good thirty years ago, when David and I were visiting his mother. She would have been about the same age I am now. On that day, she told us that she felt stupid. She held up a piece of paper. On it was her unsteady scrawl, “Phone Bill”. Then she said to us that she’d made herself a note a few days before to pay the phone bill. Then that morning, just before we arrived, she found her note, looked at it, and wondered who the hell Bill was, and why she needed to phone him.
To this day, those two words, “phone bill” have been a kind of a code between David and I as we have our own senior moments…moments when our memories tell us that they’re having a power brown out, and to check back later.
It’s not that there are a lot of those moments for either of us—yet. For me they happen a couple of times a week. Monday I had one, when I was making my morning coffee. I saw the soup pot on the stove and realized I needed to go over and turn it on to bring it to a slow simmer. When I got over to the stove I blinked and had to work hard to recall what I wanted to do there.
David has the same problem. He gets up from the sofa and heads out of the room, and then calls to me to ask me what it was he was going to fetch. I tease him when he gets back that he forgot two things: first, what he was going to get, and second, the fact that I can’t yell loud enough for him to hear me, because he didn’t put his hearing aid in.
Life changes as you age, and that’s no joke. I’ve sometimes said in these essays that aging is not for the faint of heart. I’ve decided that the best way to deal with the reality of getting older is to just try and adapt. There’s no sense in getting upset about what one can or cannot do any longer. That’s just the way it is. When I was in my forties, I could clean my entire house in one morning. Now I can do one thing a morning. Our daughter is here, and she’s in her early forties, and she can clean the entire house in one morning, and I let her. I still get a few things done on my own, and I still do most of the cooking. It’s as much effort now for me to do the few things I manage as it once was to do it all.
David having built those table gardens is another case in point when it comes to adapting. Instead of both of us grumbling about not being able to garden, this was a way of getting a little of that hobby back. Last night I went out and picked green beans for supper. No getting down on hands and knees required.
We’ve had a successful year of tomatoes and beans; the rest—well, frankly I knew the carrots and beets wouldn’t take. They should have been thinned, and they weren’t. We’re not sure why the Swiss Chard failed—it might have been something in the soil. We had one small green pepper, with three more still growing and three medium sized cucumbers. The zucchini squash? They were planted in the tomato box, (two plants of squash and please don’t ask me why he put them there) and while they bloomed, several times, there was never any squash that formed. I think that the bees couldn’t get in to pollinate, and the breeze didn’t touch them, protected from it by the tomatoes as they were.
Next season, we’ll be less ambitious with what we plant. A friend is planning to send me some beefsteak tomato seeds, and I am looking forward to planting those next year. I’ll start them out early, and in cowpots—we have a wonderful window in our living room with southern exposure. It did wonders for that old Yucca we had. I’m certain it will do well for those tomato seeds.
Also, next year David is planning to build one more table garden. This one will be a bit longer and narrower than the other three, but it will be deeper. In it, we’ll plant potatoes. He argued about getting seed potatoes and whether we could find any, when we first hit on the idea a couple of months ago. I just shook my head. At the time I had a bag of potatoes that had sprouted. That was what my mother often used. So to prove a point, I planted one. He then planted a few more.
On Monday, having seen a chipmunk digging in the vicinity of one of those potato plants, I went to investigate and found 2 potatoes. David dug around and found a few more. Not much of a potato harvest, enough for one meal. It was an experiment after all. I believe the Chippies got a few and had themselves a feast. But it’s all good. This year was a learning year. Next year has to be better, right?
I’ll add a caveat to that. It’ll be better, provided we don’t forget the lessons we learned this year—and memories rediscovered in the aftermath of mistakes made, this year.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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