aging

An Old Bowl and the Silver Spoon

/ Juliana Lightle / 1 Comment

My Aunt Julia, Mom’s sister, lived to 94. She loved fine antique china, linens, and French furniture. The ordinary bowl in this photo defies those inclinations, its origins a mystery. How did she acquire such a plain bowl and why? I will never know. In spite of its age, cracks, dull finish, I have used it every morning for decades. It is my breakfast bowl, filled with yogurt or cottage cheese with dried blueberries and a handful of walnuts, or, occasionally, oatmeal.

The spoon, on the other hand, is not ordinary, but rather good silver from the set Dad gave Mom on their first wedding anniversary. Unlike Mom, who saved her good silver for holidays and special occasions, I use these spoons daily and think of her unconditional love, strong will, determination, and love for beauty.

Bittersweet

/ Juliana Lightle / 1 Comment

Ten days ago I took the final photos of the house I originally built as my dream home. Events occur, life changes, new adventures await. Final photos taken from the patio, great room, and walkway to the barn of the house where I lived the last 13 years.

Now I am in The San Gabriel Valley in northeastern LA County house hunting. The trees here, the flowers, the succulents astonish. Purple jacaranda trees in full bloom line many streets. Yesterday evening while out strolling around the hotel grounds for some exercise, I saw the largest humming bird I have ever seen. I feel excited to start this new adventure.

Teacher Tales

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Sometimes a teacher’s work seems to never end and, honestly, it keeps me from posting here as often as I might like.  At the same time, it provides me with endless joy and entertainment.  The last couple of days brought lots of laughter.

I teach 8th – junior English and Spanish 1 and 2.  This past Friday, Spanish 1 class became the site for lots of laughter.  We were practicing translating sentences from English to Spanish.  To date they have learned to say what they like, sentences about the weather, write about time, and to use the two “to be” verbs used in Spanish among other things.  Somehow in the process of describing a person using a variety of adjectives they have been taught, one of the students blurted out, ” I think old people are ugly.” I said, “So you think I am ugly?”  This caused a minor uproar with laughter and indignation.  In an attempt to make the situation better, he continued, “No, I mean people over 60.”  I repeated, “So you think I am ugly?”  By this time everyone was laughing, including me, protesting his attitude.  He started to try to wriggle out of that one when I pointed out that it might be better if he kept quiet.  He started to say something about wrinkles but that got shut down by the other students.

Just before all this,  his younger brother came into the classroom.  He is the student who wrote a page-long poem about my hair last year.  He said to his brother, “What is wrong with you?  She is beautiful.”  Then walked out of the room.

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By this time everyone was laughing and talking except the student who made the original remark about old people and a few were shouting at him about his awful attitude.  By the way, in case you do not know, the word for ugly in Spanish is feo or  fea, depending on whether you are describing a male or female.

This weekend I read 50 or so book reports.  One of them included this statement in response to the question, “What did you learn from this book?”  “I learned it is sometimes fun to be bad.” The student was referring to the book, “Tom Sawyer.”

I have no clue how to respond to that remark.

 

 

 

More Student Poems–Two More Dogs

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

With my students, it seems dogs are a rather poplar subject when assigned a poem to write about a pet.

 

Hondo

Hondo is special,

in his own unique way.

He loves his home,

but never seems to stay.

 

His best friend is Scrappy,

and together they roam.

They chase wild bunnies

far, far from home.

 

Yes, Hondo is special,

in his own unique way.

A pain in the butt,

And in my heart he will stay.

Author:  Taylor Shugart

 

 

Cricket

Cricket, a dog of 13.

She was a tiny little one,

Getting older.

She was losing control,

Now in diapers, and

moving slowly.

She begins to fade.

Cricket is gone.

After school, tears fall,

my best friend was in the pasture.

Author:  Skylee Isham

 

 

 

The Clerk

/ Juliana Lightle / 1 Comment

He’s gorgeous!

 

I walk into the department store,

plan to pay a bill, order a griddle for the new stove,

see a bald headed 30 something with a big, brown beard.

He is not what I get.

 

A younger man walks up, “Can I help you?”

Explaining what I want, I look.

Wow.

Caramel skin, five inches taller than I,

obsidian ringlets falling, not long,

cut short to a form a big ball, a glossy poof.

 

He’s not too thin, not too chubby.

Just right.

Straight nose, not too long, not too short.

Just right.

Arched eyebrows, oval face.

Just right.

 

He’s drool worthy.

It’s ridiculous.  I’m old enough to be his grandmother,

maybe older.

 

Do we ever get too old to look, to appreciate?

 

 

Afternoon at the Library

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Usually at the library I checkout and return books. Because my grandson is taking art classes at a nearby college for three hours in the afternoons, I go to read and observe.  The same older men show up everyday.  Some, acquaintances or friends, quietly chat. They look scruffy with dirty, stringy hair.  Are they homeless?  Does the library provide an air conditioned refuge?  They read, look at magazines.

One man in a tan Alaska cap takes notes from a large book.  He appears well groomed, clean, with a sculpted, small beard. Another alternates reading and checking his cell phone.  At a separate round oak table a man sits in a dark heavy coat–it said 102 on my car temperature gage when I arrived.  He never looks up, concentrates on the black laptop in front of him. The white earbuds stand out against his heavy dark beard.  His fingernails are dirty.  A white haired man approaches the round table I occupy and asks if he can sit there.  I reply, “Sure.”  His dark skin shows the heavy creases of outside work and age.  His fingernails are clean. He focuses on filling out an application for a commercial driver’s license.

In the several days I have stayed here to read and wait, I have seen only one woman where they allow adults to sit.  Do these men, day after day, come here because they have no place else to go?

A Letter to the Man I Loved the Most

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Today is your birthday, June 6.  I cannot wish you Happy Birthday because you fell into a coma a year and 1/2 ago and died several months later.  Our daughter came over and over to see you, unconscious, eyes staring into empty space.  She drove the five hours back and forth repeatedly.  Sometimes I came with her.

What happened to you?  Your mahogany hands and arms looked as they did when I first met you decades ago.  I looked at the signs of aging on my own; yours seemed so young, ageless.  But not your face.  I wonder if I would have recognized you on the street.  I remember the first time I saw you, sitting on a sofa–fancy, engraved silver tipped cowboy boots, shirt open half way down your chest, and your smile radiating across the room.  I knew immediately I had to have you.

What happened to you?  How could I have guessed I could be so wrong, decades of believing you just left, no explanation, nothing.  Then after you are comatose and I cannot talk to you, I learn a far different truth, a truth that never leaves me, a truth from which I will never totally recover.

What happened to you?  Charming, laughing, the man so many loved.  That you.  Did the other you finally dominate–the sad, disappointed, angry you?  The you few knew, the hidden you, the one I often held, tried to protect. Now I talk to your cousin, the one you forbade to tell me the truth I never knew, the friend I thought I had lost forever.  Yesterday we talked.  Today she left me a message.  She and I will never be the same, she filled with irreparable loss, your company, your mutual love, and I with a hole in my heart that can never be filled because I cannot talk to you.

What happened to you?  A decade ago when you came to see our daughter, it was like I had seen you only yesterday, in so many ways as if we had never been apart.  It haunted me.  You could have told me then, the truth.  But no, I had to learn it by accident from our daughter.  She thought I knew, that you had told me.

What happened to you?  I look at photos of us, young, filled with hope and love and promise, smiling brightly toward a camera.  I wonder how different my life might have been.  I will never know.

 

 

 

Home-made Essential Oil Body Butter

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

I use essential oils for many things and even cook with them especially cumin, lemon, rosemary, fennel, etc.  I tried so many lotions and none really worked for the dry climate in which I live.  This year remains exceptionally dry–no measurable moisture in over 100 days.  This causes dry skin itching and discomfort.  Therefore, creating my own body butter seemed a good solution.

1/3 cup oil–I use olive oil

5.5 oz. jar of organic shea butter

20 drops frankincense essential oil

20 drops myrrh

20 drops geranium

10 drops jasmine

These ingredients can be adjusted to suit your preferences or whatever essential oils you might have on hand.  I always use frankincense and myrrh.  The last time I made this I did not use geranium and jasmine; I used neroli and sandalwood.  Find out what works for you.  If the jar of shea butter is larger, you can adjust the rest of the ingredients to larger amounts as well.

Warm shea butter in a microwave but do not melt.  Place in a bowl.  Add oil and essential oils and whip until smooth and thoroughly mixed.  I use an electric mixer just as I would for creaming butter and sugar for a cake.  Sometimes in colder weather the shea butter can become somewhat crystallized.  The crystals will melt in the warmth of your hands.

Your skin will love you.

 

 

Grateful

/ Juliana Lightle / 2 Comments

Six days ago a huge storm struck, including eight inches of hail, a rain deluge, and high winds.  While the hail denuded many plants and bushes, the deluge made my drive a mess.

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Although it may be hard to determine the depth of the gravel and dirt and rocks from this photo, many of the rocks are bigger than the size of the fists of both my hands together, large enough to not want car tires to drive over them.  The gravel and dirt on the far side of the photo were at least eight inches deep.  Luckily I have a small tractor with a bucket and a helpful grandson.  He picked up the larger rocks and hauled all of them to the ditch created either side of the steep incline above the cement.  The rain had created a trench a foot deep in some places and exposed a pipe to the septic system. He filled parts of these trenches with the bigger rocks.

The next morning I used the tractor bucket to scoop up dirt and rocks and haul them to washed out places in the upper drive.  It was impossible to get it all with the bucket given some of the space is not very big or where it was possible to maneuver the tractor.  Therefore, I had to scoop it up and remove it with a shovel.  It took several tractor buckets full to get rid of what I had to shovel.  Finally, this morning I finished sweeping the rest of the fine sandstone off the cement.

After all this, why am I grateful?  There was no damage to my house.  The hail broke windows in some houses not far away, the wind blew light weight buildings into neighbors’ yards, and some people nearby had roof damage. I only have some tiny damage to the barn roof.  It could have been a lot worse.  I feel grateful to have escaped with just a messed up driveway.

Why do I feel even more grateful?  It occurred to me that I was able to clean up most of this except for my grandson’s help with the rocks–which I could have done but it was helpful.  I can still shovel gravel and dirt, a lot of it, lift and carry 50 pounds of horse feed from the vehicle across the barn–about 40 ft or more–and dump it in the container. I can work for hours doing this sort of stuff and feel fine afterwards. Yes, I feel grateful that I can continue to do all these things myself and what is more, usually enjoy doing them, feeling productive and independent.

When people ask me how I do all this, I usually tell them two things, yoga (as well as lots of other exercise mandatory if you live in the country and have animals) and heathy food.  My yoga practice began decades ago; I never stopped.  I practice it at least three times a week, sometimes more.  I stand on my head in the middle of the room several times a week.  My favorite foods are mostly vegetables.  The only carb I really like is rice. One of my dad’s sayings was, “You are what you eat.”  He still ran a farm at 90.  Yes, I admit, genes probably help, but without the exercise and self discipline, it probably is not enough.  I also meditate daily which does not require lots of time unless you want to spend lots of time doing it.  Even 15-30 minutes a day matter.  Exercise, yoga, healthy eating, meditating will all make for a happier person.  I promise.