We have gone through a tough couple of months with our Florida rebuild and serious health issues for my husband. He was caught in the barbs of turning 80, afraid he was going to die from blood clots in his lungs, and wishing he could die from the pain of shingles on his face. We knew we needed to spend the winter in our Florida condo but returned to our condo exhausted and with a list of tasks to complete to make it our home that competed in length to Santa's Christmas toy list.
"We are feeling our age" doesn't begin to describe the complexity of what we are experiencing during this season of being old. For solace and distraction I have been pulling out my current favorite book of poetry, Ted Koocher's Pulitzer Prize winning Delights & Shadows (2004).
I scanned my favorites, the ones marked with the little sticky markers, and a few that weren't marked. I settled on his poem, "Old People." The beginning lines read:
Pantcuffs rolled, and in old shoes,
they stumble over the rocks and wade out
into a cold river of shadows
far from the fire, so far that its warmth
no longer reaches them.
Koocher writes a few more lines and then ends with these words:
... They are not searching
for anything much, nor are they much
in need of finding something new.
They are feeling their way out into the night,
letting their eyes adjust to the future.
Thank you, Ann-Christine, for challenging my creativity and providing an invitation to write my own words to begin to express the complexity of this "normal" phase of aging. I especially enjoyed being able to integrate my huge appreciation of Koocher's brilliant writing skills with the joy I experience when working with my photographs.
Here is the link to this week's Lens-Artist Challenge.
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