AND SUDDENLY IT IS AUTUMN after a very short summer. The change of season virus has been and gone and now it is time to prepare for the coming winter - and when I think of preparing for winter it means storing the cupboards with the blessings of summer - i.e. bottling fruit. Because it was such a wet spring there were no bees around to fertilise the apricot tree, that usually produces around 12 quarts of fruit as well as jam, I had to succumb to buying in peaches to bottle. Sound silly because it works out cheaper to buy tinned peaches instead, but I convince myself that doing them myself, they taste nicer. The pear trees don't rely on bees to fertilise them ( our wood pigeons do that as they go from flower to flower selecting buds to eat ) and in a race to beat the Rosella Parakeets I am picking the fruit and bottling them as soon as they ripen.
P.S. Reminder: for N.Z'ers. To those who have shown interest, I need to know by tonight, SUNDAY, by messenger https://www.facebook.com/lois.e.broom - if you would like a signed, discounted copy of MEANDERINGS at $NZ35.00 which includes postage, as I place my order with payment, tomorrow morning.
Postscript: I was talking to the nurse who was taking my annual blood test last week and the subject came up of retirement. We were both in agreement, that in New Zealand anyway, that retirement is nearly a taboo subject. Oh yes, there is the upbeat advertising of how lovely it is to go off and live in a retirement village, or go on a world cruise, but the actual in-head stuff of emotionally handling this final life stage? It’s carefully ignored. She said she hears so many sad stories from the older to elderly in her office in her capacity as a Laboratory Technician. The general advice she can give them is directing them to the various groups to belong to that are available around town, but she says they are looking for books that can relate to what they are feeling inside written by people who have experienced it for themselves – not from writers or psychologists who think they know what it is like. It’s like telling a mother what child birth is like – if you haven’t had one you don’t know and no one who has had a baby is going to tell her the whole truth, we’ll swap notes instead after she has had the baby herself. But here it is different again, even the retired people don’t really talk about it amongst themselves as if it is showing up their weaknesses. We laughed and agreed on that!
ReplyDeleteThat’s when I told the nurse I was actually writing on this unspoken subject of retirement and by book, “When We Were Old,” which is about going through those first couple of years after retiring was now available at our local Government library and my new book Meanderings should also be available also in a few weeks. which is a book about wondering what to do next, and what are we are physically capable of doing, and for how long, now that we have accepted that this is it, the last stage of life?