With or Without Goats, Life Is Good-The Art of Aging

I found Carolyn Henderson through the Word Press community’s Show & Tell page, Freshly Pressed.

Actually,  a detail of  ‘Opalescent Sea’ (above) by her husband, artist Steve Henderson found me. I could write a sonnet about the way Steve works his blues.

Discovering Carolyn and her creative, witty blog MiddleAgedPlague was a happy bonus. Thank you Carolyn, for contributing to The Art of Aging.

Guest Post by Carolyn Henderson

My best friend from college wrote me once, “I’m content to be a fat, middle-aged woman milking goats. Life is good.”

My visceral reaction was to recoil against the word, “middle-aged.”

She can’t be!

Because if she is, so am I – and I am so NOT middle-aged.

That was a few years ago, and now, at 47, I can mentally double my age to get 94, which seems a pretty decent and reasonable amount of time to nag my kids, forget where I put the electric bill, and chop up celery for soup. My inner Babe may argue, but the mathematician in me is forced to admit that 47 more accurately depicts the middle of a lengthy life than it does the first trimester.

Perhaps we could come up with a different term to describe the middle of life, something not associated with the words crisis, syndrome, or plague.

Perhaps, also, we could ease up on our expectations to maintain tight, washboard abs, starting by admitting that many of us never had them in our twenties to begin with. We don’t have to embrace the wrinkles, but we can accept them as signs that we have laughed or frowned a lot – may it be the former. Grey hair can be inexpensively covered by the magical ingredients in boxes –or not.

I am beginning to see my friend’s wisdom: Life is good. Being middle aged is simply a statement of how long I have lived – nothing I can do about that. But How I live – ah, now that is something I can do something about!

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