Happy New Year

Matilda Ledger, borrowed from Google images

J appeared at my door the other day. "Look at me and tell me what's wrong," she said without preamble. I looked. Then I laughed. Her sweater hung at odd angles, buttoned incorrectly by not one, but two buttons. The hem dipped toward her knees on one side and was hiked up to her waist on the other. "And I went to the bank this way," she sighed, dropping into a chair. "Not another soul in there so all three tellers, sweet young things, watched me traipse across the floor like this and me clueless."

"They'll know what it's like in oh, forty years or so," I consoled her. Then the two of us collapsed in another fit of giggles.

When we could breathe again, we agreed the slope toward old age was slipperier than we'd thought. So many things we've taken for granted, like being able to notice whether we were groomed and dressed properly or that we knew where our glasses and keys were or we were sure, when we set out, that we knew where we were going, have suddenly become things we must question.

"Just the other day, my car went one way while I was intending to go another," J confessed and I remembered the day a few months ago when I had been half way somewhere only to realize with a start that I couldn't remember, just for one eensy moment, where that was.

J and I are not old by today's standards though we've passed the middle-aged mark. She jokes often about being on the 20 year plan (but we've been claiming that for the past few years). We're both still active physically. We both garden and she does farm work, I ride my bicycle and hike, and we try to eat sensibly. Still, it's these little slips, these wrong buttonings, that give us pause.

To counter her look of despair, I confessed to J, rather sheepishly, that when I'd unwrapped the present she'd given me for Christmas a few days back, I'd tasted it. She sat up straight and then fell back, guffawing, her hand over her mouth. What I'd thought, in my glasses-less state, was a piece of divinity was actually a chunk of hand-made soap.

So it goes. Arm in arm, slipping and propping each other up and laughing hysterically at our failings, J and I are heading off down the hill. Along with the rest of you.