27 | December | 2015 | MY ENDURING BONES

Here’s my thought on aging:

It happens.

How do I plan on staying young as it happens?

I don’t.

I mean, are you kidding me? Being young is hard work. It’s brutal. I have the battle scares to prove it- we all do. Why in all things that we wish for, do you wish for that?

Photo: A.M. Moscoso

I’ve heard people say it over and over again, ” I don’t want to die old and alone.”

None of us do, but at the end of the day, it’s just going to be us and the Grim Reaper.

All the hand holding in the world won’t keep him away.

Not youth, not magic or chanting or the best drugs in the world.

This is the how why and how I keep my chin up:

I’ve made it to 51…and God willing I will make it far beyond.

My nephew died as a young man. He never got the chance to even come close to being 51 let alone 81 or 91. I can say that of my friends and relatives who have passed.

I believe they are the ones who are cheering me on and giving me strength as the years pass. I think they are the reason I can look in the mirror and say, ” Whoa lady, will you look at those lines on your forehead and near your eyes” with a laugh

I have been blessed with with youth, I have been blessed with gray hair, the chance to experience my bum knee getting a little worse each year.

I have been given the gift of living a full life.

I don’t want to stay young, I don’t want to stay old. I want to experience and feel it all and when my clock stops and it’s time to move on I think I’ll be ready for it.

At any rate…

Fingers crossed!

:::Holidailies Prompt:::

If you could invent any holiday, what would it be?

There’s no getting around it.

I would have considered the Holiday Season incomplete without Halloween- so had there not been one I’d have brought it on.

See for yourself:

Getting out knives and carving up pumpkins and scooping their innards out into a gooshy pile on a plate and then roasting their seeds and planting the rest so the pumpkins run riot all over the front yard?

Check.

Finding haunted houses full of ghosts and monsters and bodies buried in the backyard or in the basement or stuffed in steamer trunks in the attic and then charging people to go in and look around.

You know- I’d actually have let them do that for free.

Anyway.

Check.

Dressing up in costumes, celebrating the strange and the macabre and celebrating all things of the night- and for those hours after sunset not being afraid of the dark?

Check.

The treats, the games and more treats and games-laughing far into the night with the faces we choose to wear, not the ones stamped on us by birth or created by life’s left hook to your face.

Check.

For one night, we can create or join mysterious rituals.

We can hold up a candle, pull open the door that separates the world from the living and the dead and peek through or walk through- move with the spirit or follow it.

The choice is yours.

Check.