Approaching "Double Nickels"

In September, I will celebrate my fifty-fifth birthday... and I am really excited!! I am so happy to have lived as long as I have, and have no aches and pains to speak of, that I wake up every morning thanking God for such a wonderful life. Sure, I'd love to have more money, and I'd like to publish at least one book, but all-in-all, it has been pretty good!

Why, then, do I have some former classmates who list their birthdates as the year of our graduation from high school/ entrance into college ( as undergraduates)? Why do they lie? Why not just leave the year off? I guess they think that, because they dye their hair to appear on screen (the two that I'm thinking of are both in areas of entertainment) people won't think that they're as old as they really are. Is there really something wrong with being over fifty? I figure that, if Oprah doesn't mind admitting her age, I don't mind admitting mine!

This past week, I began the process of stepping up my workout schedule by adding at least one, maybe two more days... Water aerobics on Monday and Wednesday (adding Monday instead of just on Wednesday), Zuumba on Tuesday, and I may even add a low-impact workout on Thursday. I'm not really interested in losing weight; it just makes me feel good! There are lots of people in my YMCA classes that are older than I am, and none of them believe me when I tell them my age (they think I'm younger!) I do not dye my hair because I don't want it to thin or fall out, and, besides, someone once told me that even if I did, I couldn't de-age my face and neck! My face and neck look pretty good... but I'm still not coloring my hair! Gray is a color!

Anyway, I just love being fifty-four, and I will love fifty-five even more! My children are both in their twenties, and they're intelligent (maybe even a little "nerdy"), independent thinking, and getting to be self-reliant! I feel very blessed! Will I ever deny my age? Don't count on it!

Saturday mornings... random thoughts

My thoughts this morning center on Saturday mornings of the past...

I guess connecting with a cousin I haven't seen in a long time has caused me to reminisce... since he and my daddy shared the same name (along with his daddy and granddaddy). Family has always meant a lot to me, although I lost contact with many of my father's relatives after he died. I have thought about them a lot... I don't know as much about them as I know about my mother's family for two reasons... my mother's family was around all the time and they were big "talkers". My father's family was less talkative, but then, they were much younger (my mother was the baby of her family and my father was one of the oldest in his family) and more active. They were always on the move. Now that we've all settled down a bit, we have time to reconnect.

Saturday mornings in our house were full of chores and music. I know that sounds like a strange combination, but anyone who knows us knows that my family is a musical family. When we cleaned house on Saturday mornings, we cleaned to music. My mother introduced us to all the great musicians, by way of our "high-fidelity record player" while we polished the hardwood floors, scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom floors until they were so clean "you could eat off them", and did the laundry.

The laundry was my favorite thing because it was my job to hang out the clothes (we had a washer, but no dryer... nobody did in those days). As soon as they came out of the washer, I headed out to the clothesline; winter, spring, summer, or fall. I insisted on hanging all the clothes by myself, because I loved being at the clothesline, outdoors in the fresh air, alone. The smell of fresh laundry is still my favorite smell in the world! I would sing to myself as I hung the clothes, and sometimes I must have gotten pretty loud, because people on the street would pause and listen. As shy as I was then, I would quiet down and they'd move on.

Saturday was, and still is, my favorite day of the week, and that should be no surprise because I was born on a Saturday. My life has been ruled by the saying: "Saturday's child has to work for a living"...

I guess I need to turn on the stereo and get to work...