It's March...How Did that Happen?

Seriously...how did it get to be March 1? I'm not prepared for March, I'm not prepared for Lent, I'm not prepared for Easter... I'm not even prepared for spring, although it will be nice when the weather warms up and the sun shines more. 

It's scary how quickly time gets away from me now that I have so much less of it left. No, I'm not being dramatic, truly. I'm in what my Aunt Alice used to refer to as the autumn of my life. It wasn't that long ago, was it, that I was in the springtime? I hear all that stuff about fifty being the new thirty and sixty is the new forty...sorry, I kinda think sixty is still... well, sixty. It's seasoned, vintage, and my personal favorite, venerable. 

Venerable means being respected because of your age or impressive by reason of age--I've heard it used about the redwoods--those venerable old trees that we once visited on one of our many trips out to northern California. They were pretty darned impressive.

But I'm not all that sure that, outside of the fact that I'm still here (genetics does not play in my favor in this), I'm particularly impressive at sixty-eight years old. In our society today, that's considered still pretty young, and even when you're looking at sixty-eight in the mirror, you're inclined to think maybe it's not all that old. But, the facts are that although my blonde hair gets a boost from a wonderfully gifted hairdresser, the hair around my face doesn't have dark roots, it's white. The lines around my eyes are quite pronounced, my knees depend on CBD oil and exercise to keep bending, I fall asleep if I'm watching TV, and I sometimes forget why I came into a room.

But...on the upside, while most of friends are retired now, I'm still working at my day job as a freelance copy editor, and I'm writing...a lot. That's nice. It's rather well, impressive that I have three books coming out in 2022 and three more in 2023. By the time the third 2023 book releases, I will have changed decades...I'll be seventy, and hopefully writing 2024 books for Tule. 

When, at the age of ten, I first decided I would be a novelist, my Aunt Alice was seventy-five. To my ten-year-old eyes, she was old--venerable--although she lived to be ninety-six, which actually is venerable. I don't think I've achieved venerable yet, particularly not in today's world. I'd like to get to venerable... and still be walking a couple of miles every day like she did and maybe even still be writing every day. 

Okay, I have no idea where I was headed with this...it started out being a lament about time getting away from me... and it is...getting away from me, I mean., but then, I started rambling...  However, rambling is often what happens when you turn an old-lady writer loose on a page.

Where are you in your life? Springtime? Autumn? Are you okay with where you are? Let's talk.

Stay well, stay safe, send light to Ukraine, be kind, and most of all, mes amies, stay grateful.