Sylvia's Journal

Today is Tessa’s birthday, a momentous day 34 years ago.  The lore of that day includes Axel burning the croissants we had brought to a crisp in the birth center’s oven which had clicked shut to self-clean. The smoke summoned the fire brigade. All this while I was in labor or resting with a baby on my belly. That I cannot remember.

This is the first time we are celebrating Tessa’s birthday in her own house. I got up early to collect the flowers necessary for decorating her chair. Our daughters and their families have added a new habit by adding various tchotchkes found around the house (and for the kids, their favorite toys). But the first order of business this rainy morning was finding the flowers. There aren’t as many here as there are at our house because the chickens eat most flowers within their reach. I found enough to do the chair.

And now Tessa is one year older. According to one Google search (quoting an unnamed study), she is entering the last year of her youth. Others claim that middle age or middle adulthood starts at 40 or even 45 – at any rate for our daughters middle age is coming into view. Imagine that!

When she was very little I wondered what it would be like to have grown up children. I couldn’t really imagine that, immersed as we were in the demanding tasks of childrearing.

At that same time I found my parents rather old.  And now we are these old parents ourselves, though I am not sure I daughters see us as old the same way we did way back when.

When I look at pictures of my parents’ age group at the age I am now I see old people, dressed in old-looking and tired looking clothes. When I go another generation back I see 50 year old grandmas in rocking chairs. Times they are a-changing.

We feel still rather young, even though we are what the French call our ‘third age.’  Is there a fourth, I wonder? Some years ago I decided that my aspiration was to reach 130 years. Then, one day, someone said that she felt sorry for me, as she noticed my joints are already problematic now. This led me to revise my aspiration downward a bit.  It’s 95 in my retirement money needs calculator, so it will be somewhere between 95 and 130. By then all my joints should be titanium.