I have so much gratitude for the service this old body has provided over the decades. And more or less, maybe less nowadays, it continues to do so.

Back at the gym now, well, a different gym after mine went broke during the suit-down. Getting back to center may not happen after this recent hiatus, but getting stronger.

Looking online for a powered kayak loader to get that boat on top of the car. As to this, I can remember hoisting it overhead with my bare arms just a few years back.

A friend asked me yesterday whether my knees hurt more going upstairs or downstairs. It’s a tossup, but I am doing both.

I have never in my life liked the way I look but I’ve never really be-moaned that. When I fix up, I don’t scare small children. And now, for someone in my age-group I don’t look bad at all. Turtle necks and shades are very helpful. And when we get rid of these Covid masks, I’m wearing red lipstick.

Other people’s bodies seem to fail them before time and it breaks my heart.

A dear friend, exactly the age of my youngest daughter, has breast cancer. She is a single mother, an orphan, no grandparents, no sisters. Her own mother died of the same thing when she was in high school. I saw the first picture today of her getting her first chemo. I can only reach out to her, hundreds of miles away, with little ointments on Caringbridge/Amazon.

My neighbor across the street had a kidney transplant a couple of years ago. This month, he will lose his leg. I guess this often happens. He is out every day now, mowing the lawn. Trimming the hedges. Waxing his car. If I ask him how he’s doing he says, “Looking forward to getting that prosthesis.”

Where do people get that kind of courage.

In the meantime, I am just so very grateful.

It’s a word that came to me years ago to express the total and complete absence of a thing when it is gone. It can be a person, an animal, or even a beloved tree. A dear friend who moved away. Even a place that you had to leave behind.

There was a lot of gone-ness for us this past year. And you think you have moved on. Then you see that the engraver has returned to add Mother’s death-date to the grave marker she and Daddy now share and you cry for what you hope will be one last time.

Or the vet’s office calls and says you can come pick up the ashes.

You want to let go and you want to hold on. When you no longer feel that terrible ache in your solar plexus, or deliberately think of something sweet and precious that makes you cry, then they are really gone. So you hang on.

Being old, I know that, eventually, you no longer feel that heart-breaking pang. I no longer cry when I think of Mama Harrison, or my beautiful German Shepherd Alice, or the redwood trees I left behind.

Gone-ness.