Day Four

We celebrate a birthday week in our house, so I think I am on Day Four. Here’s a card Tom gave me, with a Mary Oliver poem she cut out and put inside. The card says, “You don’t stop laughing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop laughing.”

And the Mary Oliver poem is
“Self Portrait”

I wish I was twenty and in love with life
and still full of beans.

Onward, old legs!
There are the long, pale dunes; on the other side the roses are blooming and finding their labor no adversity to the spirit.

Upward, old legs! There are the roses, and there is the sea shining like a song, like a body I want to touch

though I’m not twenty
and won’t be again but ah! Seventy.
And still in love with life.
And still full of beans.