We collaborated on the Thanksgiving Day menu yet I did most of the cooking. I made baked beans, wild rice, steamed broccoli, sweet potato and apple sauce. No specific dessert yet the baked beans served double duty because of how much brown sugar was in them. I made applesauce in the morning from the last of the cooking apples in storage. It was prelude to making apple sauce cake, yet I didn’t get that far.
I used the Social Security Administration life expectancy calculator and found I can expect to live 14 more years based on gender and birth date. One presumes the SSA has more data than most to make this calculation. It doesn’t seem like a lot: 14 more Thanksgivings, 14 more garden harvests, 14 more springs and summers, 14 more winter writing sessions… I don’t look forward to reading all the obituaries yet I will. Hopefully my name won’t be among them until the statistics have been borne out. Fourteen is a finite number. As we all should know, it is 14, plus or minus.
Over time I watched the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption multiple times. As the character Andy Dufresne said in a letter to his friend Ellis Boyd Redding, “Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” That is, unless one consults with the Social Security Administration. After which we’ll have a pretty good idea when death is near.
The character Dufresne also famously said, “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” It’s good advice, especially as winter approaches and we get on with our lives.
Journey Home 
You must be logged in to post a comment.