This is an old photo from a few years ago, Southern Alberta, on our way to Waterton National Park.  It's beyond beautiful there.

I didn't work on Tuesday because my back was so sore on Monday, my whole body was sore on Monday actually.  So I took a muscle relaxant, slept in, puttered around the house, went for a walk with the dog and worked on my grandson's quilt.  By the end of the day my body felt much less battered.

I feel stress in my body.  First it was my stomach, then it was my muscles.  I saw the doctor on Wednesday and I asked for a bunch of xrays of my sore and aching joints.  Good news, arthritis in only one joint, my left knee, which means that my pain is soft tissue pain which I can do something about.  So I'll see a physiotherapist and try to be kinder to my poor body.  I felt like an eighty year old woman on Monday.  I'm back to a fifty-six year old woman today.  Fucking stress.

I seem to be obsessed with aging and death lately.  In part, I'm sure because of where I work, but also because I am aging and I will die.  Mortality kind of shoves itself in your face after fifty.  I wonder how much longer I will live.  What that life will look like.

When my father was fifty-five he had open heart surgery.  This was in 1975 and it was a big deal.  I was thirteen at the time and my younger brother would have been eleven.  I can imagine my father must have been terrified at the thought of leaving his wife and two youngish children alone.  He survived.  At some point he must have read or heard a statistic that people only lived about ten years on average after open heart surgery.  He was obsessed with his death for the last fourteen years of his live.  I'm beginning to understand why now.

My father was a control freak and I may be as well (cough, cough).  There are so many things I want to do and I feel life slipping away, even knowing that really, I only have today.  I'm guessing that this is all part of the aging process, reconciling the knowledge that I will die, with the knowledge that I am not yet dead and want to enjoy the time between now and my death, all the time not knowing when that death will occur.

In the mean time I will walk the dog, work on the quilt and tomorrow the big guy and I will take Katie to watch a swim meet organized by the new agency that is caring for her.  I'm guessing there will be cheering and clapping which Katie loves.  She will get a chance to socialize with her peers and we will get to meet some of the best people in the world.  What better way to spend my time.