At 62…as good once…!

Fall is my favorite time of year. The colors – gold, rust, cranberry, orange, red – nature shows her best, most flamboyant self at the very end of life. Winter’s coming – brown and bare – but right now, there’s a show going on outside!

Fall is also my favorite time to take a drive. There’s a new color around every corner. Pumpkins. Sheaves of wheat and bales of hay. Gourds. And even through Christmas is knocking on the door – Mother Nature is keeping a firm grip on her November finery.

Gus and I took a three hour spin around our neck of the woods today. Found a tiny craft show. Had lunch at a great Mom and Pop restaurant. Gus always gets lunch leftovers – but I found out he’s not a catfish fan. Last week’s BBQ was much better received! It was a great mountain drive before heading home to do chores.

Driving back to Dover, snapping fall leaf pictures all the way, I had the radio cranked up to our favorite country station. I’m rolling along and thinking. Enjoying the sun and the colors. Remembering happy Mike memories and grinning. Having a few wry thoughts about standing in the fall of my own life, at 62. Feeling kind of like these leaves, wanting to put on as much life and color as possible before winter arrives, but having a hard time getting into it these days.

Just as I turned onto our mountain, a Toby Keith song came on the radio. It was a song that Mike and I laughed through again and again – “As Good As I Once Was”. It was our most favorite “best buddy-OMG-remember when” song. And as I listened, they all came flooding back – a lifetime of memories – the ones I lived and the ones Mike told me – about the times when we were, indeed, bulletproof.

I drove up the mountain laughing. I’ve listened to this crazy song for the last half hour. I see Sherry and me in our most audacious 20s, young and carefree. I see Jim and me, wondering how we survived some of those years – as we liked to shake our heads and say, “It was a good 80s…!” I see Catlin and me as a new mom. I see all the chances I took in my life – all the times I just jumped off that roof and prayed my cape would land me safely on terra firma.

And I see Mike. That slow grin and those dancing eyes, having a blast telling me of his exploits – some stories he’d told dozens of times, and some just to me. I see him and Scotty, brothers to the bone, and a lifetime of catching each other’s back. I see him and Joe, laughing that special laugh that only lifelong buddies share. I see his full-out go-for-it daily attitude that caused him to kick cancer to the curb for eighteen months – while renovating our cabin, setting up our world in Dover, driving 6000 miles to Alaska, and laughing most of the way.

And now, sitting here in the last amber rays of this glorious fall day, I’m not nearly as melancholy about 62 as I’ve recently been. Even with the new aches and pains, the realization that I can’t do physical things as easily as when I was 30, and this loneliness I never thought I would again have to endure – it’s still not yet winter for me. And I think I will keep playing this crazy song just to remind myself of that.

I promised Mike a lot more adventures and a lot more laughter lived through me. And I won’t break that promise. The initial crush of grief is past. My mind is sifting through possibilities, working on plans for what’s next. I’m not 30 – but I’m still here. God willing, there will be plenty more chances to say it –

Stand back and hold my beer…at 62.