Hey MOBsters, it’s been so much fun to read your comments on Friday’s post. Thank you for sharing memories and confessions of your mental and physical age.
As you know, I’m 51, which puts me right between the two people in this photo.
That’s newborn Ian, 6 weeks, and my beloved Grandma Grace, 99. They represented the two age extremes of the 1991 family reunion. Grandma lived to be 100. She was sharp as a tack almost to the very end. Well into her 90′s, she would drive around visiting “the old people” who were all younger than she was.
For the last several years of her life, she was in a plain old nursing home, which she viewed as a luxurious break from all the chores she’d done forever. She was especially glad not to have to shop, cook and wash dishes anymore. May we all be spry, as alert, and – most crucially – as adaptive as Grandma Grace. That was a quality bred into pioneering prairie families like hers. There was no point in complaining about things. You had to just make the best of every situation, no matter how dire.
The point in my life where I felt the most exhausted and worn out was in July 1994, pregnant with twins in an un-air-conditioned house, with a pre-schooler who needed lots of TLC. Everything was swollen, I shuffled around in mules, fell asleep reading simple books to Ian, and felt worn-out and ancient for months on end.
Compared to that, even 51 feels young and frisky!
