It is never too late to follow your dreams no matter how old you are. We all have different chapters in our lives, going to school, choosing a career, earning a living, raising a family and finally planning and enjoying your retirement years. Maybe life’s early realities pushed your dreams aside, but there is no reason you can’t pick up those dreams now and make them happen. Where there is a will, there is a way. Learn to play an instrument, go back to school. If you want it badly enough, you can make it happen. If I can do it, so can you!
As mothers, especially a single mother, as was dealt to me with the death of my husband, we sacrifice, nurture and work selflessly with both the heavy weight of parental responsibility and at the same time struggle to embrace the joys that come from raising humans we love like no other then, now and into eternity. Did I ever dream that when they were ready to leave the nest, it would be so far away?
Diaspora. How times have changed in just one generation. I often envy those families whose children are able to settle near them. It would be so nice to have family gatherings on the spur of the moment. Sunday dinners around the table with grandchildren and extended family members is but a dream for me. Sometimes that is a hard reality to face.
Fortunately for them, my children have had to move to where their interesting work took them. Unfortunately for me, they are all a long, long drive, or a winged trip away. It’s doable now, but the older I get I think about when it will not be so easy to hop a flight to be near those that I love so dearly.
I moved away from home when I went to college and never called my parents home mine again. I had dreams of my own that couldn’t be realized there. But, honestly, I never thought of how it must have affected my mother. Until lately. The shoe is on the other foot now for me and It doesn’t feel good at all. Isn’t the saying ‘just walk a mile in my shoes’? I now know how my mother must have felt when both of her children never permanently returned to her warm nest.
They say a good mother raises her children to be able to fly from the nest and spread their wings. Even though we know that is true and the unbridled happiness for our young is real, our mother-wing feathers are plucked bare, knowing life will never be the same.
In the end I have comfort in knowing that I have been blessed, that part of the way, they were to walk with me.
Life and thoughts and just about everything under the sun. The only order to it is life itself as lived. Natural chaos! I am married and have three grown children who are interested in breeding horses, flying and creating. My youngest is the lead singer/songwriter of the Grammy nominated band, Tonic, Emerson Hart. So here I am, wanting to read about you and at the same time bringing you along with me to mine. I hope you will find me just as interesting as I do you! Hop aboard.
Along with beach living the natural evolution of things once living in the sea or sandy soil has always fascinated me. I find a visceral beauty in the final stages of nature’s cycle, dried up or cast away by the wind, afterlife uprooted and washed ashore by the angry sea that no longer has use for that which has ceased to exist.
Nature’s loss has always been my gain. For forty-five years I have walked along the beaches scavenging nature’s junk that to me are works of art. Things of beauty free for the taking.
I have filled my garden with rusty anchors and drift wood tumbled and carved into masterpieces by the sea like no other artist could. Rainbows of smooth colored glass shinning like treasure chest jewels in the wet sand, shells of all sizes and shapes, and if I am lucky a starfish will catch my eye and find a final home in my large copper kettle in the center of the coffee table. Poseidon and Neptune look down upon us wearing clay crowns of coral twisted and frozen by death into elegant inertia forms.
Throughout the years pots have been filled with dried palm fronds and over-ripe pods dropped to the ground to make way for new green growth. This evolution is my artistic supply fulfilling my love for all things related to the sand and sea.
Sandra's Hart My Over 60 Lifestyle Journey 