The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball. ~ Doug Larson

If you go over and click on my Archive link, you'll find that once upon a time I blogged pretty regularly.  No matter how busy or chaotic my days were, I'd sit down and write about them.  Or I'd attempt to put a string of words together and hope they'd make sense once I hit the "Publish Post" button.  Is it because I'm older and I'm beginning to run out of steam a bit now as 60 creeps ever closer that I don't find the time to write as often as I'd like to?  I'll be 58 in a few months and the distance from sitting on the floor to standing upright is getting slower and creakier every day.

Aging is a funny thing.  In our heads --  at least in my head, which is the head I'm writing about here...do we ever age as much as our bodies do chronologically?  I don't think of myself as being old or older.  So it comes as a shock to me when I try to button a button or pop open a pickle jar and find that my hands and fingers don't seem to have the strength and dexterity in them they had only a few years ago.  I bought a Cindy Crawford aerobic DVD a while back and it shocked me when I couldn't keep up...when my muscles wouldn't stretch and work like they once did without any conscious effort at all.  I sometimes catch a glimpse of the skin on my arms that is beginning to get the fine, papery lines in it that I always associated with elderly people.  There are ropey veins in my hands now...no age spots yet, but I'm sure they're coming.  Luckily, for the most part I inherited my mother's beautiful skin and I don't think my face looks as old as it could...it's still pretty supple and not too droopy.  And my hair has been silvery-white for so many years...also inherited...that to see photos of me with my naturally brown hair I had when I was younger is pretty freaky.  Even my Dear Hubby and kids say they can't remember me with dark hair.  But my grandsons only know me as I am now and when they say matter-of-factly, "Gram, you're old!" I have to agree with them.  Somewhere...somehow...it's creeped up on me.

But it's not as scary as the thought of it used to be when I was young.  With age comes grace.  Acceptance. A new way of looking at things.  Experience.  Wisdom.  The knowledge that Life's little blips on the radar screen are just that...nothing to worry and fret and stew over endlessly like I did when I was younger.  It's given me the ability to relax a bit and enjoy life, to smell the roses and watch the birds at the feeder outside our living room window with my grandsons.  To sit on the porch in the evening and let my mind wander.  To enjoy the simple pleasures in life with more appreciation...the fairy-flicker of fire flies on a hot summer nite, the song of cicadas in the trees.  Crickets are a soothing choir that put me to sleep at nite...and lull me back to sleep if I awaken.  And I find myself having the time, the patience, to enjoy rediscovering the world thru my little grandsons' eyes on a daily basis.  I thought, when I was a young mother, that I did the same thing with my own children.  But, sadly, not to the degree I do now.  I know these two little boys will be the last chance I ever have at enjoying the joys and frustrations of caring for children on a daily basis.  Tuesday Dylan starts Kindergarten.  Just yesterday, it seems, I watched him enter this world.

It's bittersweet, yes, knowing that the hour glass is emptying ever faster now.  It's a bit disconcerting to realize I'm not the young woman I once was.  But there is still enough ahead of me that I want to hold on to this ball of wax a little longer.  To dig my fingers in a little deeper.  To savor every moment.