On Aging: "You, see, Ann, Grandma is getting "real." That's all." (referring to The Velveteen Rabbit)... I was left to consider for the first time that growing old could be a wondrous passage. The markings of it didn't matter, except to those who didn't understand. What mattered was becoming "real." What mattered was loving and being loved for a long, long time...my Grandmother carried inside her a certain renewing flame that is hard to define. A paper found beside my grandmother's bed the day she died..."May I wake ready for that daily, yet greatest of gifts - a fresh start."
* Firstlight by Sue Monk Kidd (August 21, 2008 Newsletter)
On a beautiful aged woman: She has a gentle face and looks lovely to me with her gray hair. There is a peace and a beauty about her face that is missing from the rest of the faces there. She blesses us.., "God be with you wherever you go."
* War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters . 1939-1944 by Anne Lindberg (July 31, 2008 Newsletter)
An entry by Anne Lindberg this week in her diary used the same idea describing a woman she'd met that day..." She is like a bird of Paradise, absolutely no fear, no inhibitions, great zest for life, adventure, mystery. Warmhearted, impulsive, but uncompromising." (August 9, 2007 Newsletter)
Exerpt from March 22, 2007 Newsletter
Local Wonders by Ted Kooser
Helen Molleston has died at 92. There was a letter in my box this morning. She was the last living friend and neighbor of my parents. In one of her journals, May Sarton says something to the effect that one of the saddest days of her life was when she realized that there was no one still living who remembered what she had been like as a child. On my desk among all the other odds and ends I've collected is a wooden potato masher that she gave me twenty years ago......How much I will miss this woman, the last to die of my parents' generation and therefore the one who, without ever knowing it, has carried the burden of being my last living link to their time.
I have been sitting in a hospital room this week with a woman that knew me as a child. That loved me as a child. This woman lit up when she saw me, for she truly knew me. She was the woman who had me over for tea in high school, who wrote to me in college, who in my baby album is the first picture besides relatives to be holding Camden in a rocking chair. This is the woman who saw Camden the day he took his first steps in her kitchen. The woman who held Camden bawling in the backseat to the hospital when he burned the entire back off of his legs with a curling iron. This is the woman who loved her Susan - I do not have a memory of my life without her. As she lay in her hospital bed this week, all I could think about was the incredible, unexplainable treasure smiling at me in that little 10x10 white room. The incredible treasure. A woman that knew me as a child. That still sees me, not as a 40-year old woman, but as a child. Who when I'm in her presence I haven't grown up, I am still little Susan - not the Susan with all of the complexities of growing up. I remembered the essay from Ted Kooser's book and was so glad to find it a few days ago for all of you.
I find the concept of having those around me that knew me as a child fascinating. I wonder why that fascinates me? Who is still alive in your world that you may rarely see, but who when they see you, they see you as a child? We must find these treasures and write these treasures and let these treasures know the impact they have on our lives. Time flies...years glide by...are we taking time to be with those who see us as a child? We will not have these treasures much longer.
