Old Love
I honestly think these are the best years I’ve known for love. These so-called “golden” years.
They aren’t contaminated with my youth of angst and bitterness over my childhood and how everybody had done me wrong.
They aren’t filled with worry over where the dough is going to come from or if the children are going to turn out okay or even with any hopes and dreams for the “future” at all.
No “future” to worry about. Just years that can easily be counted on all my fingers (and hopefully a few toes). In other words, all that sh*t is behind me, and all that’s left to do is just love.
Love is so easy to do when it hasn’t been turned into some kind of backpack that carries all those expectations of my youth in it.
Once across a waiting room I saw a gray-haired woman tenderly — almost mindlessly, as if it was an ordinary, everyday thing to do — caressing the back of the neck of the gray-haired man sitting next to her. He looked up at her from his magazine and spoke softly to her.
“Isn’t it wonderful to be our age and in love?” I said quietly.
They knew. They both knew what I was talking about. It’s different, all this love without all that stuff attached to it.
It’s freer, more exciting, and deeper, if something can be exciting and deeper at the same time. It’s even sexier.
There are no expectations on any of it. It just comes and comes and then comes right back at you.
I’m so grateful for the opportunities I had in my life to shake loose from the stories I’d allowed to take hold of me. So grateful that I have been able to write new stories.
And I’m not done yet, I know. There are still a few paragraphs and pages and maybe even chapters to rewrite, but in the meantime, there’s this love between this now gray-haired “old” lady and this gray-haired “old” man.
Don’t let all the stuff about old people being old fool you. These “old” years are the best years for love I’ve known.
If you’re not there yet, you have a lot to look forward to.
Siani is beloved for her widely published stories on family, caregiving, grief, late-life love and more. Find her at www.facebook.com/StoryBelly