Thursday, October 21, 2010

Spring

Spring is well and truly here, and my garden again looks like my header picture. The roses are bursting into their October flush.

"I'll tell you a secret," I sometimes tell the teens. "Life gets better the older and older you get."
They often laugh, (with me)....Are the young still told that being young is the happiest time of their life?
I don't think that many older adults look back on it as such.

When I was a teen, the most enviable female in the world - not that I envied her, her life was too dazzling to be yearned for - was someone who suffered from anorexia nervosa, alcoholism, depression, throat cancer and kidney disease.
Not that she did at the time, of course... that all lay in the future for Sandra Dee. She died at the age of only 63. Or perhaps 61: her son says that her mother inflated her age so that she could start work at 2, rather than the 4 years old that her mother claimed.
"Youth is like Spring....," my father quoted to me back then, at a loss when he found me in floods of tears about ...nothing. I had no idea why I was crying. "....a much overrated season."
I heartily agree. Blissful bits. Storms. Cold snaps. Unpredictable.

2 comments:

Relatively Retiring said...

I completely agree with you that life gets better as you get older.
The nightmare of teenage years still haunts me in dreams.

Frances said...

That sounds so awful, Relatively Retiring: your experiences scoured you even more than mine did me, evidently. Escape meant all to me, although I didn't realise it at the time, and age brought most of that to me.