For me, the question has always been the same: Is something beginning or ending? Something is starting now —I’m wiser and dumber at the same time, healed up in life and therapy, restless and curious. I’m coming into life.

I have a good marriage and an excellent farm, and I am writing and writing,  taking flowers and loving them. I have more to say than ever.  This is a new beginning; I mean to use it meaningfully, doing good and working every day to be a better human.

I don’t do old talk and refuse to be defined by my health. Most people ask me, “Are you okay?” with a face of great concern as if blood is pouring out of my nose and I am minutes away from extinction. Usually, I’m just walking into the post office.

I don’t want to talk about my health every day, and I don’t wish to hear about everyone else’s every day. Academics write heartless and cold articles about psychological quality or physical changes at my age. But as I eagerly transition from one phase of my life to another, I have learned that getting older is just about getting older. The rest is up to me.

Like humans, flowers are ever-flowering, growing, and dying. They are beautiful one minute and gone the next.

It sounds like life; I choose to make the best of it. My flowers are helping me.

So which one is it? A  beginning or an end?

The task, says writer  Joan Chitisster, is not to endure the steady march to the end.  It’s to come alive in new ways and kiss life’s hand.

The truth, good reader, is this:

I have never been alive before.