You know when you’re out camping and you wake up to yesterday’s sweaty shirt, only now it’s damp in the coolness of morning? That smell.

As I’m getting ready for work, I sniff everything before I put it on. I used to be able to wear a bra for more than one day.

Wait — I’m not the only one who does that, am I? Anyway, I don’t now. My bra always has the damp camping sweatshirt smell and needs to be laundered every single wearing.

This may raise the unsavoury question of whether I would wear panties for more than one day — trust me, NO. I always have fresh panties every day, and since I don’t really like doing laundry, I have a great stack of them so I never run out of clean ones. My mother raised me right — put the fear of God in me that if I was in an accident, how would it look to have dirty underwear? Now I’ll need to win the lottery to buy enough bras to have a matching stack so I can go back to doing laundry when I feel like it.

So, bra in laundry, I still smell it — the old lady smell. Have I actually managed to cross that line in my 60^th year? Maybe it’s my place. It was once a mess of papers and dust, of dust on electronics, warm, and of dishes in the sink. You’d think I could keep up being one person but it seems I enjoyed the chaos somehow. Now I’ve changed all that.

Because insanity by definition is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results — this from Einstein, I believe, so who could argue? I am determined to do things differently.

To that end I hired, for a few hours each week, for several weeks, a lovely young lady to help me clean and clear. A lot went out the door. What’s left is clean. Even had the carpets cleaned. And still I can smell it. The old lady smell remains.

I smell it on myself right now. When I sniff each piece of clothing, they smell all right, but still I smell it. It’s in the air. Is it wafting off my skin, or what?

I am sure this is why old ladies wear such strong perfume. I’m convinced that it is worn to change what fills their nostrils from old lady smell to something that reminds them of the fields of daisies they pranced in their youth.

To passers-by, it smells like old lady covered in a thick cloud of perfume. I know that, and yet I’ve been thinking about looking for a new perfume.

I am unable to do so living here on the west coast. Everyone is allergic to everything. Breathing the blossom-filled air year round is more than enough to block nasal passages, thank you. No one needs the extra challenge of breathing in various artificial perfumes.

There will be no wearing of scents, and in fact, please wear unscented underarm deodorant and hair spray too.

Do I embrace my old lady smell? For now it seems my only choice. With laundry done and everything clean I was sure it would subside. But no. I’m distressed about it. Surely I don’t have to have old lady smell for the rest of my days. That won’t do in Hollywood!

The Joy of Aging: What’s that Strange Aroma? is a post from: Life As A Human

Retirement, I assumed, spelled the end of meaningful existence. As for Florida, well, in my mind it was just a wasteland of over-development choked with kitsch, the beaches littered with pale, northern bodies like so many stranded Beluga whales.

When my mother and Jim, my stepfather, retired and bought a trailer in a +55 community in Florida, their surprise move seriously challenged my point of view. For the past seven years, they’ve spent the five months of Canadian winter working on their golf game, taking line dancing classes and whacking the life out of snakes and spiders that dared to cross their postage stamp yard.

Admittedly, the source of some of my cynicism was in how I missed them through the winter. I even wrote a play called “Snowbirds” in which a retired couple golfing in Florida spend all their time pining for Christmas back home, a sentiment I selfishly hoped consumed my mother and stepfather.

Back in Canada, their reports of glorious weather, February swimming, birds and wildlife, grapefruits off the tree and fresh squeezed orange juice made me increasingly envious until finally I broke. It was the last place on Earth I thought I’d ever stoop to visit, but we planned our March break trip to Florida. We’d pack up our swimsuits and fly south for a couple of affordable weeks, partially subsidized by my mother’s couch.

The anticipation alone was enough to get my 13-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son through winter in high spirits. As for my SAD-suffering sweetheart, Alison, our plans turned what would have been a winter of dark depression into a season of bright, crisp days that hurtled us toward a swift and certain southern spring.

As for me, I was just looking forward to some sandal-friendly temperatures and promising everyone I wouldn’t ruin their vacation by grumbling too much about the environmental abomination I was sure awaited us.

The omens on the flight down were not good. We sat at the very back of the place in the only windowless seats where the engines were unbearably loud and the bathrooms reeked.

As if in anticipation of the kitsch that awaited, our wire-haired flamboyant steward was over-the-top entertaining. Via intercom, he jokingly identified passengers by seat number as troublemakers, dissed the meager airline snack food and read the in-flight safety manual as if performing Shakespeare.

As we descended into Orlando, he read a poem, a kind of Florida prayer, in which termites and cockroaches and fire ants and every other pest bug imaginable were honoured. The poem ended with a tribute to insect repellent.

As the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign turned off, the steward called over the intercom, “For those of you traveling to Florida to visit your mother” (how did he know?) “shots of tequila are available.” And finally, “Welcome to paradise!” The passengers applauded.

Later in our trip, I asked my daughter to tell us her favourite part. Her answer surprised us. It was stepping out of the airport two weeks earlier. She was absolutely right. Our flight arrived near midnight. When we walked through the sliding doors to find our rental car in the parking lot, a wall of blooming bougainvillea met us. The breeze was warm and fragrant.

As tired as she was, my daughter jumped up and down. “I can’t believe we’re here! I can’t believe we’re here!” I drove with the windows down. Beyond the Orlando sprawl, we passed farmland where silhouettes of horses stood against the pale sky. My horse-loving girl swore she’d never leave.

The next morning, we awoke to sun through little trailer windows and the songs of a thousand birds. Alison and I slept in my mother’s bed. The kids shared the room Jim had built on. The place was so small, Mom and Jim spent each night at a neighbour’s place for the duration of our stay.

Out on their two-person deck overlooking the street, we soaked up the sun. Every person who passed said hello. Many of them knew who we were, had been expecting us. The neighbours introduced themselves. Not a face looked younger than 60.

People walked tiny dogs or rode by shirtless on bikes as if they were eight-years-olds. The less able rode around in quiet electric golf carts. Others just walked, with or without canes. Everyone was cheerful.

The kids set out to explore the neighbourhood, returning every ten minutes to announce they’d found the pool or that an alligator lived in the lake or to describe the house-dwarfing cactus they’d discovered.

They gave us a detailed report of the shuffleboard deck where a dozen people where wiling away the morning. When Mom and Jim returned, they gave the kids their bikes to explore further afield, all in complete safety for the traffic was very slow indeed.

After breakfast, the kids easily coaxed us to the pool, my worrywart mother wheedling about sunscreen. Bah, sunscreen. It’s March! We spent most of the first day at the pool. I played and played with the kids, marveled at the Sandhill crane poking around the lawns, enjoyed the mockingbirds and egrets.

At dusk, tens of thousands of swallows spiralled overhead like a cloud of magnified blackflies. My son said they looked like pepper in the sky. By then, the sunburns were showing up. Red arms and faces where the sunscreen got washed off. By 4am the next morning – Friday the 13th to be exact – my son was throwing up from sunstroke. Alison and I nursed him back to health through the next day, but we felt terrible for not heeding my mother’s warnings. My son felt terrible because the dear boy feared he’d ruined everyone’s holiday.

Of course, he hadn’t. He recovered soon enough to swim a little more and explore the neighbourhoods on foot and bike, to join us on sojourns for fresh squeezed tangerine juice. He reported to us about the old guy at the pool, tanned like an old leather belt, who seemed to have taken up permanent residence there. The guy seemed neither to arrive nor to leave. He was just always there.

I believe my son came to think of the park as a step out of time as if suspended from his world of seasons and semesters, a place where nobody worked or went to school, were you got up when you felt like it and went to bed when you were tired and ate when you were hungry. Where you swam when you were hot and sunned yourself when you craved more heat. Where you drove around in golf carts because you could.

I see my mother’s retirement to Florida differently as a result. She raised my sister and me in poverty, the wife of a fisherman who built our house around us as we grew up. For a long time, we had no running water, no toilet, no car.

When my father died in his mid-thirties, my mother struggled the way many single moms do with crushing financial and emotional burdens. She and Jim met at a time in her life when she was probably most in need of companionship, and they’ve been together since, working several struggling businesses, finally getting into furnace oil delivery. Over time, they built the company until at last they could sell it, making just enough to support a modest retirement. I promise to begrudge my mother and stepfather nothing ever again for retiring to Florida.

After a few days, we continued our vacation in other parts of the state, but my mother’s haven home in that +55 park was like nowhere else. As a result of our short stay, I concluded that Florida is a playground for seniors, a Limbo for those between the life they’ve already lived and the death that will too soon be upon them.

It’s too simplistic to say that life is good in Florida for seniors. It’s carefree. Everyone in the place is of the same vintage and therefore happy for each other and for themselves. Each knows the other as a fellow traveller through the same Earthly time and space. They’ve made it and it’s been all right and now there’s a little more at the end. Each is happy for this sunny day and this sunny day and this sunny day in this land of eternal summer where all the oldest kids have come to play.

Photo Credits

All photos © Darcy Rhyno

Florida Retirement: Life, Love, Limbo is a post from: Life As A Human

They also believed in taking time to celebrate their marriage by marking their “monthaversary” on the ninth of every month. Even while raising five active kids and assorted hangers-on, Mom and Dad always went out together on their monthaversary to have time alone together. They also repeated their wedding vows on that date each month, a practice my husband Russ and I have adopted as well.

But just now, as Valentine’s Day approaches, I’m thinking of their hands-on love. Mom and Dad loved to hold hands. I noticed this particularly in the last few years. Whenever we would set up a group family photo, Mom would remind Dad (as if he needed reminding) that she wanted him beside her to hold her hand. When Mom could no longer walk over to Dad herself, he would come over to sit next to her and take her hand in his.

They also had a hand signal love ritual, one I remember learning as a child myself. One of them would squeeze the other’s hand four times (“Do you love me?”) and the other would respond with three squeezes (when I was a child, the “game” was, does that indicate “Yes I do” or “No I don’t”?). The response was two squeezes (“How much?”) and the finale was a long, strong squeeze indicating the strength of their love.

I can’t remember now, but I think it was Dad who, a few years ago, finally shared with me that this was their private signalling to each other of their love.

When my mother was gradually passing away from us two years ago, at home in her own bed with family close at hand (interesting how we use that expression), Dad asked for their twin beds to be pushed together, and for Mom to be turned onto her right side at night so he could reach over and hold her hand as they slept, side by side. That was also, by the way, the name of “their song”… Side by Side.

Dad had a hard time believing the kind hospice workers when they told him that Mom was actually dying. We’d been through close calls with Mom before, but this time the signs were clear and we all knew it was a gradual, peaceful, but final, decline…it was just a matter of days.

I remember the evening when Dad was able for the first time to accept the finality of Mom’s condition. He told the hospice worker, as we all sat discussing the situation once again, that he now agreed that this time things were different and he might be losing Mom. He said the way he knew this was because the two of them had a secret communication system that was fail-proof, but Mom hadn’t responded. For the first time ever, she hadn’t squeezed his hand.

Mom passed away a couple of days later, with Dad sitting beside her bed holding her hand, the sun streaming into their bedroom, and family surrounding them.

Photo Credit

“Hands-On Love” © Star Weiss photo

“Emily and Gerry Weiss, side by side” © Star Weiss photo

Hands-On Love: Humour Goes a Long Ways in Marriage Success is a post from: Life As A Human

I’ve been a weight lifter for the better part of a quarter-century now, and have seen the inside of many a gym. I’ve always liked working out around a bunch of guys, and in times past have also found the gym an interesting place to meet men.

Once upon a time, the conversations were ostensibly about things like glutes and abs, but ultimately had the potential of leading to something, well, interesting. How times have changed.

In the past week, for instance, I had gym conversations with the guys about menopause and childbirth. They were good conversations, and Lord knows I’ve got plenty to say about both those things. But hey, you have to know it’s an odd time in your life when that’s what you’re talking about with the guys at the gym.

Let me stress at this point that I’m in a committed relationship. I’m not looking for sexy little conversations anymore. I guess I’d just never seen the day when fortysomething men and I would be standing around the gym talking about menopause and childbirth.

I can’t pin down the age when I first started noticing a change in the way men and I interacted. I think I was probably mid-40s (I’m 53 now). It first manifested as young men acting in a very friendly way toward me — not in that hey-older-lady-what-about-it? kind of way that I recalled from my late 30s, but more like you-remind-me-of-my-mom.

On the one hand, isn’t that a drag? I never was much of a cougar, having found it all just a bit predatory for my tastes. But I do have fond memories of a brief couple of years as a Mrs. Robinson-like character, and you can’t help but feel just a moment or two of regret when you realize you’ve grown old enough that the young Benjamins of this world now view you warmly as a harmless mother substitute.

On the other, it’s given me the chance to have really terrific conversations with younger guys – conversations that no longer get tangled up in all that weird man-woman energy stuff and can just be genuinely interesting and engaging. Same goes for guys my age, who no longer try to impress me with stories of their big jobs and instead just get down to the nitty-gritty, like miracle cures for their sweaty menopausal partners.

Whole books have been written on what it means to age as a woman, so I’ll leave that to others deeper than me to sort out. I figure there’s no point dwelling on the “fairness” of anything about the aging process, seeing as there’s really nothing fair about the whole business.

My experience though, is that men do look at you differently as you get older. It’s not a fun transition by any means  — but then again, it’s not so bad over here on the other side. As it turns out, talking to a guy about his wife’s menopause symptoms is a heck of a lot more interesting than most passing conversations a person might have. A big high-five to aging if that’s the reason.

Unfortunately, I know all too well where this aging thing is leading. My youngest daughter and I play music in seniors’ facilities around the region, where you can’t help but realize how invisible old people eventually become in this world of ours. I don’t expect to like that stage.

But for now, my gym friends and I will feel our way to a new kind of conversation, and I’ll be happy to act as the fount of older-woman knowledge. OK, the sexy-babe years were fun, but so yesterday.

From Perky to Practical: Gym-Inspired Thoughts on Aging is a post from: Life As A Human