On The Brink of Fifty

I'll be fifty soon. In two weeks will be the eve of my fiftieth birthday. So I've been thinking about some things, some big, some small, some fleetingly, some nagging at me. People offer me all sorts of mock condolences and I've been given numerous compliments regarding my relative lack of decrepitness. I've been told fifty is the new forty! Which sort of makes sense to me, but I'd rather be here than forty again. Reliving the decade of my forties is something I don't know I could survive given the upfront knowledge of all that would happen in those ten years. Maybe I'd do some things smarter, maybe not. My ex says that he prefers to think of himself as not fifty plus, but rather forty-nine ninety-five plus shipping and handling. I keep getting junk mail of the electronic and snail variety from the AARP. Somehow I didn't mind flashing the AARP membership card when it was my spouse who was fifty, I liked getting that extra ten percent off a hotel room. But now that it applies to me I'm not sure that I find it so much fun. I can't help but think that my maternal grandmother was my current age when I was born. My own mother was 25, right smack in the middle age-wise. According to family geneology records, we go back three more generations on that particular branch of the family and find that daughters were born to my foremothers at precise 25 year intervals. Makes me feel like I dropped the ball in some cosmic matriarchal plan by not producing a daughter when I was 25. Then I think about who I was dating at the time and I'm reassured that it was probably a good idea that I was on the pill. The point is, my earliest memories of my grandmother are, well, grandmotherly. Flowered dresses and aprons that draped around a soft, rounded body. Swollen ankles that spilled over the top of sturdy, sensible shoes. Busy in the kitchen stirring up a cake or digging in a voluminous handbag for Juicy Fruit gum to share with me. Following her through her vegetable garden and helping pick the bounty and eating sweet cherry tomatoes, carrots and raw peas that tasted like the earth and sunshine. Her hair always white and her glasses with that harsh, horizontal bifocal line that obscured her kind and twinkling brown eyes. She was always old to me. And now I'm her age. I have lived such a very different life in such a very different world than the life and world she experienced. And I think my life has been kinder to my body. I've born two children where she bore five. I still have all my teeth and I don't remember her any other way than with dentures. I'm still fit enough to climb a ladder and hack at tree branches and wash my car in the driveway. I don't know how she felt at fifty but I feel great most of the time. She wasn't all that much older than me when she stopped driving. I just bought a new car and intend to drive it for at least twenty years! Maybe it's fair to say that my grandmother's fifty isn't my fifty. Esther died seven years ago at the age of ninety-two in a nursing home in North Dakota. Sometimes I feel like I channel her spirit when I water the tomato plants in my garden or when I work in the kitchen. But I think I'm more like her mother in some ways, my brunette hair has only a few traces of gray like hers. Kim, who has cut my hair for fifteen years, says she'll let me know when it's time to color it. So far so good, I think I'm high maintenance enough as it is without having to color my hair. Then again, I may just let it go like Esther did and not bother.