Yesterday I ruminated on whether life after 50 years of age is uphill or downhill. This morning, after spreading four-yards of mulch in the front lawn yesterday, I am more convinced than ever that being over 50 is an ascent—an uphill grind! Don’t let anyone tell you that you are “over the hill” and descending! This morning, sore and stiff, I am still on the ascent at three-score ten, plus three!
I’m thinking now about getting “On the Road Again!” This journey will be a solo one—Odysseus and I will be on our own for a week. My travel mate will remain at home to do her sewing and quilting work while I visit two friends, one in WV (Mark) and one in KY (Bill). I’m on the ascent just thinking about it!
In the mid-70’s I was given a book, The Friendly Road, written in 1913 by David Grayson. It is a story of a man, a husband, who leaves his farm one spring morning, walking, to visit the countryside around him and to meet the people along his way. A man after my own gypsy heart! He records the events and the people he meets along his way and decides in the end, that life is a “friendly road.”
“I assure you, friend,” Grayson writes at the end of his journey, “that it is a wonderful thing for a man to cast himself freely for a time upon the world, not knowing where his next meal is coming from, or where he is going to sleep for the night. It is a surprising readjuster of values. I paid my way, I think, through my pilgrimage; but I discovered that stamped metal is far from being the world’s only true coin. As a matter of fact, there are many things that men prize more highly—because they are rarer and more precious.”
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