A Door Opening

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I celebrated my 84th birthday several months ago. By anyone’s standard, an old lady. And I love being that old lady. I don’t even mind the whiff of derision that, in our society anyway, usually attaches to those words. It seems to have nothing to do with me.

Because despite the inevitable losses that come with a long life—and those brought on by an aging body—this old lady is glad to be exactly who she is. Glad to have come, finally, to a place . . .

And here I hesitate. What place have a come to? A place of peace? It would be easy to use that word, but what does it mean?

Certainly my life is more “peaceful” than it was in the days when I was rearing children, gathering foster children and exchange students under my wing, living out the expectations imposed on a clergy wife. More peaceful than it was when I left a 28-year marriage without any means of support except for what could be gleaned from one of the world’s most unreliable careers. More peaceful than the years that followed, juggling writing and speaking and teaching to cobble together a living.

(Every year, for most of my career, after assembling a record of my earnings and paying my taxes, I left my accountant’s office saying to myself, “Well . . . I did it this year, but I’ll never do it again!” And though it always required stretching, the next year I did. And the next.)

But peace, however hard won, never seems to be a permanent condition.

Last fall, on a hike in northern Minnesota, I tripped over a rock embedded in a gravel road and did a face plant. My face and most of the rest of me survived with a bit of scuffing. But my old brain got banged pretty hard.

It was my second concussion. On a similar fall several years before, I knocked my head so hard that I have never remembered making my way back home. Or anything about the fall itself except the beginning stumble.

The advice I was given on leaving the emergency room after that first concussion was simply, “Don’t get another.” (As though I had planned the first one.) And I came to understand why.

With the first concussion I had two amazing black eyes and a headache that came and went for well over a year. This time the black eye went away faster. I didn’t have much of a headache. But I was left with a muzzy, muzzy brain.

Dare I say an old lady brain?

I could still think big thoughts, but the little ones, such as where I was supposed to be at one o’clock on a certain afternoon, simply flew away. Every week, every single week, I showed up at the right place at the wrong time at least once. That went on for a couple of months.

I was embarrassed, of course, but one of the advantages of being old is that you’ve been through so many embarrassments you can’t take them too seriously.

Yet there was more. The psychic force that once propelled me, day after day and year after year, to rise in the morning for the express purpose of writing seemed to slip away in that fog. And so, even now when the fog has cleared, when I haven’t muddled an appointment for many weeks, I find my days so bereft of any thoughts I might want to commit to paper as to be a little frightening.

I have long known that the world doesn’t need more Marion Dane Bauer books, but there is no question, I need to keep producing them. How else to define my days?

I have three more picture books in the pipeline, all scientifically/spiritually based in the mode of The Stuff of Stars. I have another, a baby book, out seeking a home. There is a collapsed novel that I have yet to untangle. And I’m researching a new picture book idea. So, surely, I’m still here.

But it doesn’t feel as though I am. Not quite. How can I be when my fingers have lost their familiar place on the keyboard?

I approach each new day as though I’ve forgotten what a day is made for. What shall I do now? Read? Meditate? Walk the now-icy paths of the parks I love until I’m cold and tired? (A cold and tired that comes too fast these days.) Maybe I’ll look for a new recipe.

Or clean out the refrigerator.

Yuck!

Each day arrives, clean and empty, as though it wasn’t really made for me.

And yet this emptiness feels—almost feels—like a door opening. As though there might be something surprising, something much to be desired on the other side.

More writing, surely, whenever I’ve finally filled up again. Whatever that filling will take. A future without writing is beyond imagining.

But for the first time ever, I wonder.

Might there be something more to do with a life?