Musings and memories...

 June 28, 2023

Getting older is not for the faint of heart. But do you want to know something? I’ve been looking at what other folks in different age groups are going through, lately, and I’ve come to a not-so-amazing conclusion.

Life, regardless of the age of the person living it, is damned hard. In fact, I think it’s harder in these times than in any previous one, despite the advent of technology and innovation.

That’s not a negative point of view. It’s a statement of fact. Facts, for those of you who have friends or family members who may have forgotten, are those little nuggets of something called truth.

Now truth is represented by those chart-topping hits from yesteryear, “Accept responsibility for your actions”, “My right to swing my fist ends at the edge of your nose,” and that wildly popular little ditty, “Hello, neighbor, let me help you with that.”

Life is hard and sometimes way too busy, but it is not hopeless. The circumstances in which we live life may be ever-changing, but there are some things that don’t change, and it becomes more and more important that we identify those rock-solid anchors that help us to navigate our days and the inevitable challenges that come our way.

I can’t tell you what your anchors are. Nor can anyone else. That’s a decision for you to make, one of the many hard decisions that you will be faced with during your time on this earth.

Some folks make the family their main anchor. Their family—husbands, wives, children, are the most important thing to them. Ensuring everyone is safe, fed, housed, relatively happy, and growing is the reason behind most of their actions.

Some choose their spiritual or religious faith as their anchors. They have various rituals that help them get through their daily ordeals. Their faith even helps them to prosper year in and year out. It’s the cornerstone of their existence.

In fact, a lot of people use a lot of different kinds of things to get through each day, and not all of them are healthy. Our society has evolved into dangerous territory over the last few years. Too many people live transactionally, eschewing a solid core reality for everchanging and ever temporary satisfaction. They fix their sights on the transitory, instead of look to the enduring.

We are urged to get it now, do it now, which cuts out some of the more meaningful experiences that can be garnered if we just slow down and take our time. Anticipation as a positive experience is almost a thing of the past. And so, too, is the sense of satisfaction garnered from knowingly doing the right thing.

My father died when I was 8, and my personal memories are more liked freeze-framed print outs, mental photographs that captured moments in isolation. When I was in my early adult years, I concluded that the reason I couldn’t recall days or ordinary times in motion was because of the trauma I suffered as a result of his death. Until it happened, you see, I didn’t know that it could. I guess you could say that in the beginning, my daddy was my anchor—but not even he was strong enough to deny fate.

Children in the 1960s were a lot less sophisticated than the children of today, and that is no hyperbole.

For that reason, growing up, I prized any time my mother was in the mood to talk about my father. There was one time when I was trying to figure out how to handle money—which is, friends, one of the hardest lessons we ever learn. And my mother told me that my father had a rule when it came to whether or not he would buy something for himself. He would look at the price and calculate out how many hours on the production line he would have to work in order to pay for it. Then he would honestly ask himself: do I want that something seriously enough to put in that many hours on the line? And if the answer was yes—which unsurprisingly was rare—then he would get it, after he’d worked those dedicated hours.

That small illustration not only gave me a guideline to use—an anchor, if you will—it told me something kind of sad and yet kind of noble about my father.

He clearly hated his job. As a young man, he’d spent most of his spare time the way I spent mine as a teen—writing.  But he loved his family so much that he deemed their survival more important than what he had to go through every day at work to ensure it.

I consider that knowledge as a magnificent legacy from the man who, through it, continues on to be my anchor after his death, and is still so to this day.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 

A little on aging...

 June 21, 2023

Today is the first day of summer! And I am willing to bet that announcement has raised a couple of eyebrows and even caused some of you to “pfft.” I agree. For too many of my American friends, as well as those in different spots here and there across Canada, it’s “been” summer for a few weeks now. In fact, I bet there are lots of people who are already thoroughly sick of it.

For those who are anal like me and interested in the minutia, the new season began this morning at 10:57am. At this point and in my own opinion only, the official beginning of summer serves only one purpose: as a tangible benchmark indicating one more day closer to winter which, according to the Ashbury Family Lore is October 1 to March 30, inclusive.

The seasons do blur somewhat, and it may or may not be my imagination that the blurring seems to be happening a lot more often, lately. It is what it is, and I will take a moment and celebrate being able to witness another summer solstice.

Each morning, I spend a bit of time reading tweets. There are a few well known people I follow, most of whom I hold in high regard. Some are on the left side of the political spectrum, and some are on the right. Some, I have no idea of their politics, but they are folks who generally seem to have their heads screwed on straight and offer tidbits worth thinking about. There’s little I like more than experiencing “ah ha” moments and being given food for thought.

Well yesterday, I read something that really made huge sums of money more relatable to me and I thought I’d share that with you. Imagine being a time traveler, and one dollar equaled one second (as in one sixtieth of a minute) of time you could reach into the past. With that in mind, then:

     1 million dollars would be 11 days ago.

     1 billion would be 1992 (31 years ago).

     1 trillion dollars puts us back to 31,000 B.C.

Holy gobs of money, Batman!

Now, I can’t imagine that yesterday was the first time that illustration was in existence. I wouldn’t even be at all surprised to learn that a lot of you may have seen it before.

But that was the first I’d seen it, and it stayed with me for most of the day. As a side note, it also helped me to understand why, while there are indeed millionaires and billionaires, there are apparently, as yet no trillionaires.

I slowly continue to come out of my personal miasma—the creative brain fog that descended upon me over the last few years. My sixty-ninth title with my publisher became available last Friday, and yippee, it’s listed as the top best seller at my publisher’s site for the last 14 days. And I am trying, very hard, to see to it that it won’t be the only book I have out this year.

So far, the planning for the next is going well, and I’ve even begun the actual writing process. Over the last two years that process itself has slowed considerably compared to what it had been just a handful of years before. Some of that, yes, has to do with simply getting older. I know this because it’s just not the writing in and of itself that’s a challenge to me these days.

I no longer seem able to keep those many balls I used to juggle in air up and moving like I used to. My reflexes have slowed, my ability to multitask has diminished, and I find myself looking for my words a bit more often than I would like.

I am convinced that while all this is true, it really is just a natural part of the aging process. That doesn’t mean that I don’t try to push my limits. I still do that. It just means that if I fall short of what I would like to accomplish, I no longer beat myself up about it, mentally. Or emotionally. Or spiritually.

I do take comfort, as well, in the fact that for the last several decades, I made it a point to take time each and every day to be grateful for what was as it was happening. For quite some time now I have considered every moment precious, and every breath taken a gift.

And though I am not fully there yet, I am currently working on exhibiting more grace in the reality of my infirmities—even if at the moment those infirmities only display themselves now and then.

We live in a time and a place that isn’t perfect. But it is abundant and wondrous in its way—if we only choose to see it like that.

We are, all of us, really very lucky.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 

Spring, you say?

 June 14, 2023

It’s supposed to be summer, officially, in one week from today. But I have a feeling that the only place it will be summer is on the calendar.

Now, I don’t mind overly much if the temperatures are moderate—I recall my mother once saying that she would be happy if it was 75 degrees all year round (24 decrees Celsius). I never understood that at the time. I didn’t care if it was hot. I didn’t care if it was cold. I used to make my mom shake her head because it was just as likely that I would wear shorts in the winter as big comfy sweaters in the summer.

But we get older, and we change, and yeah, I can see the attraction of 75 degrees year-round as opposed to 40 or 90. What I can’t seem to find is any attraction in 55 and damp with a chilly breeze thrown in for good measure. I tell you, my friends, I really am trying to cut down on the number of pain medications I take each day. Mother Nature did not, apparently, get the memo.

Our table gardens appear to be doing well. Most of the newly planted beans have taken. David came up with a brilliant idea of cutting a few of our water jugs in half, and inverting them over the bean seeds, pressing the plastic down so the critters couldn’t dig down and eat the seeds. Those plants are now too much plant for the critters to bother with. In fact, they’re ready to be transplanted. I am looking forward to a bumper crop of beans this year. And yes, they’re all green beans.

We’re still eating of the veggies that I put down last fall, and that is a very good thing. Yes, there’s the value of preservation. But the beans and the corn and squash actually taste way better than anything you can get at the grocery store off season.

These days, I serve mostly fresh, or home-frozen veggies. If I have one regret in life, it’s that I didn’t have enough money to feed my kids an abundance fresh fruits and veggies off season. We usually had a garden, but not always the capacity to freeze a lot from it.

After some very unseasonably hot days this year so far, we’re now having some unseasonably cool ones. I’ve heard that in some places in the southern U.S. Mother Nature has wreaked havoc with the fruit tree crops. Early super-warm days encouraged blossoms, which were then murdered by the unexpected cold snaps.

This is just one example of why this “maxim” came into being: if you’re looking for a career with guaranteed success, farming is not for you.

My daughter and I shared some quality mother-daughter time over the last week. She had booked some time off, and her plan was mostly to just rest. She wanted to catch up on her reading, and on some programs that we’ve recorded on our PVR. But last Friday, we had an outing. We girded our loins and headed off to a big warehouse-grocery type store, one that we visit a few times a year, and for which we have a membership.

Now, while I’m not the expert in parsimony that my beloved is, I still am fairly frugal. This store sells in bulk, and there are some things, if you know your prices, that are really good deals. That said, my daughter and I have noticed that we can’t seem to leave that store for less than five hundred dollars.

This time, apparently, our stars were all in alignment, and the cosmos had pity upon us. We entered that store with our own list, and two other lists—one for a friend and one for our second daughter. We also had a “coupon” for dollars off based on last year’s purchases.

We were careful. We were disciplined. We did find a couple of items we hadn’t intended on buying. I don’t recall what hers were, but mine was a 1000 count box of sucralose sweetener, the very one I use. At the regular grocery store a box of 100 is about 9 dollars. This day, that box of 1000 was 19.99 (7 dollars off the regular price). 1000 at the grocery store would have been 90 dollars.  I simply couldn’t pass up the deal.

And after we collected from friend and second daughter, and then deducted the dollars off coupon, in the end we split the bill of 260.00. In case you’re wondering, I did indeed circle the day on the calendar.

And then one evening, daughter taught me how to play cribbage—and spending that time together with her was the best thing of the entire last week.

I’m truly blessed.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

Smoke...

 June 7, 2023

In the last few weeks, Canada has been on fire. Literally. There have been wildfires burning in five of our ten provinces (we have 10 provinces and 3 territories): British Columbia, Alberta, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and also, recently, Northwestern Ontario. That represents pretty much a fully coast-to-coast catastrophe of destruction happening in real time.

So many fires burning at one time is unprecedented. Unfortunately, unlike other kinds of natural disasters, the effects of these fires don’t stay just where they’re burning. The smoke from these wildfires is impacting millions of people not only across Canada, but south of the border, into the United States. Likely, given enough time, that damn smoke will be even farther reaching.

My heart always goes out to those whose houses and/or belongings are lost to flames. David and I have suffered two housefires over our fifty plus years of our marriage. Yes, we were pretty much wiped out twice in our lifetimes. The two incidences were more than a decade apart, but both times we considered ourselves lucky despite the heavy financial loss. You see, we lost things, but we did not lose any people.

Recovery from that kind of devastation takes a long time and carries on long after the news commentators and cameras go home go home. My prayers are that those directly affected by personal loss find help and solace as they begin to put the pieces of their lives back together again.

As for the rest of us? I’m praying that those fires are extinguished soon because the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. Millions of people have respiratory issues. My husband is one of those. Extra prayers go out to all who are in that position because it means a kind of self-imposed incarceration. This soon into the days of so-called “outside weather” after the always long winter can seem especially cruel.

There is a great deal of uncertainty that we’re all forced to live with lately in many aspects of our lives. When it comes to weather, no one knows what a season is going to be like anymore. Normal, when it comes to the median temperatures, and whatever Mother Nature has in store for us is truly a thing of the past—or is at least suspended for the immediate future. We can speculate that there will be heat in the summer months and cold in the winter ones, but that’s about the limit to our security.  

I have always believed that we humans truly do need to have some sense of security in our lives in order to function well. I remember thinking that it seemed as if we hit a point in our lives when or basic personal north-star of “normal” is set. And ever afterwards, we compare what is to what was, and usually the comparison doesn’t flatter the “what is” side of that equation.

And this north-star of ours covers everything from what one should pay for a loaf of bread, to what constitutes acceptable decorum. And when life happens outside of those boundaries that we have somehow set up for ourselves, well, it isn’t pretty.

For those of us who are older, it can feel as if life is spinning out of our control. That sense of a loss of control, a loss of the ability to feel in charge of our own lives is a hard blow for some to take.

We’ve often discussed, David and I, the fact that as we’ve gotten older, more seldom come the arguments we’ve felt moved to have, and fewer are the hills upon which we’re “willing to die”. Things that used to matter so much to us now seem trivial and just not worth the time and angst we used to spend on them.

And I don’t think that particular mental space that we’ve been exploring lately is only ours. I think others feel the same. And I do wonder if it’s a natural outcome of the aging process itself. As if the concept of retirement is a natural one that extends beyond one’s working life.

And if that’s true, how marvelous is that? It’s as if the cosmos is handing out a reward for the hard work, hard scrabble day-to-day battles waged in years past. As if it’s whispering a soothing lullaby.

It’s time to rest, stop worrying, and time to enjoy the moments that come your way.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury