Every so often when I’m just sitting and eating pancakes, the chef (my husband Rich) says–I’ve got a question for your blog readers. So here goes:
Are there things which were difficult for you when you were younger that have remained difficult?
Difficult things that have gotten easier?
I hope to hear your responses! Send to me at msagan1035@aol.com or post below. And I’ll create some blogs on this.
Now to start thinking myself…
Miriam's Well: Poetry, Land Art, and Beyond 
My mother told me that when I was a child it was a real chore to get me out of bed in the morning. She would wake me, then come back and find me sleeping again. She tried shaking me, sitting with me, singing to me – everything she could think of – to urge me into the day. It never got easier, really, but I made my way through several jobs that required 7:30 and 8 am meetings. Now that I’m retired and don’t set an alarm, and I find myself naturally beginning my day at 9 or later. I fought being a night owl for my whole life, and how I finally can allow myself to recognize my own rhythms.
Lovely! I’ll put this up as its own piece–maybe with some others–later this week.
Response to “Asking for a Blog Post”–What was difficult and is now easier:
It’s tying my shoes. I recall how proud I was of the dexterity in my tiny hands when I could tie my shoes before I was old enough for kindergarten. The memory of that sense of accomplishment is shared with the one of being able to discern left from right at the age of six based on a tiny freckle that had suddenly appeared on the little finger of my right hand. I felt lucky, and precocious, that I could do these difficult things. [There was an epidemic then too. For a year we had to stay home during the summer due to the rapid spread of polio. By mosquitos, to children.]
But then learn in my achy old age what a bore the chore of bending down and tying my two shoes had become.
As a septuagenarian I am so over the daily repetitions of getting up, cleaning up and dressing that under the strictions of a pandemic I have eliminated what seems unnecessary. Strapping on a bra seems entirely without merit now. A single schmatta works for most days. And what at home is the purpose of wearing “sensible” tied-on shoes?
These days I am nearly blind in my right eye (the wrong eye), but can easily see from the left one (the right eye), so the distinction between left and right has become ironically easier by being suddenly mysteriously irrelevant. And shoe-tying has been eliminated altogether much of the time; therefore much easier because I now prefer slip-on moccasins.
-Anne MacNaughton
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