Introducing Notes from the Prairie
Gardening, Aging, Memories, and More
“You should try writing on Substack,” said Dr. Bob Leonard. He told me it’s an online service that offers the freedom to write newsletters on whatever interests you, and it allows you to connect with like-minded people.”
His suggestion intrigued me. I had just completed a book and was looking for a new challenge. Bob had succeeded well with his “Deep Midwest” newsletter.
It’s now just a week since he made that suggestion, I have explored Substack, and I am launching “Notes from the Prairie.”
In the coming months, I plan to share thoughts about aging, gardening, memories, and more. Sometimes we’ll laugh; sometimes we’ll get serious. And always I will appreciate your thoughts and comments.
I’ll post something new every week. I will post a link on Facebook and send emails to friends and acquaintances, with samples of the first few newsletters. If you enjoy them, you can subscribe so that you get them in your inbox every week. That way you won’t risk missing one of them.
Subscriptions are free. (It’s not a free lunch, but it IS a free subscription.) And I appreciate anyone who subscribes for free. Don’t feel pressured to become a paid subscriber. You do have that option, though. Paid subscribers have unlimited access to the archives, and there will be some extra posts for paid subscribers only. Those extra posts will probably become more frequent as I master writing and sharing Substack newsletters.
Enough introduction. The first “Notes from the Prairie” newsletter is below.
Creative Aging
Not Yet Old
Denial is not just the name of a river in Egypt.
My first complimentary issue of AARP’s magazine arrived on my 50th birthday. Why on earth is the American Association of Retired Persons sending this to ME? I wondered. I am at least 15 years from retirement. I’m definitely and solidly in mid-life.
I grumbled to my husband and tossed it into the recycling bin, unopened. Each month a new issue arrived. For a year, each issue suffered the same fate.
That was two decades ago. No matter which birthday I celebrated after that, I was sure old age still lurked 10 to 15 years down the road.
Age is just a number, I thought. I am unusually healthy and very active for my stage of life. I bought a pickleball racket and joined a local drop-in group, sure my tennis background qualified me to compete with women a decade or two younger than me.
Two years ago, I decided to research the aging process, to prepare for the future date in which I began to age. I was not yet old, but if I did the math, I could not deny that, even if I lived to be 100, I was in the final third of my life.
I Googled aging, successful aging, senior living, healthy aging, and many more terms. I also Googled “best books on aging,” I ordered inter-library loan books, put e-books on my Kindle, and stacked paperbacks on my shelves. Some books depressed me; others encouraged me. And, in many forms, I confronted this fact: Aging is inevitable, and many people try to ignore the process.
Some books did imply you could reverse the aging process and seemingly live forever, or at least to a very, very, very old age. But those books didn’t ring true for me. They were usually promoting some miracle product.
Muriel Gillick confronted those books and me. In Denial of Aging, she wrote, “We would like to think that if we eat nutritious meals and exercise faithfully, we will be able to fend off old age. When we believe we will stay young forever, and when we purchase special vitamins, herbs, and other youth-enhancing chemicals to promote longevity, we are engaging in massive denial.”
I thought of the vegetarian diet I was experimenting with and the assorted capsules in my medicine cabinet. I was helping anti-aging products break sales records each consecutive year. In 2020, the global anti-aging market was estimated to be 58.5 billion US dollars, and it will likely see a compound annual growth rate of 7 percent between 2021 and 2026.
In my reading I learned 30 percent of Americans would rather not think about getting older at all. Their denial might arise from pride, embarrassment, fear, or depression. I learned most of us have a younger self-image than our actual age; we think everyone our age looks older than we do. I winced. Just the day before I had glimpsed a woman in a store window, wondered who that old woman was, and realized with a shock I was looking at my reflection.
I learned older adults tend to dissociate themselves from their peers when negative stereotypes become prominent. Yes, I thought, I withdraw emotionally from conversations when peers begin their organ recitals of their latest medical complications.
The mass of evidence convinced me: I am an older person. It also convinced me “older” is a gentler way to describe my age than “old.” I learned I would be guilty of ageism if I used the terms “elderly” or “over the hill.” But that’s a topic for another column.
Seeing myself as part of the older generation has been a paradigm shift for me. It’s as if continental drift has happened overnight. The landmass of my youth has been split off from me, not over millions of years, but in an instant.
I am continuing my research. I want to know all I can about my current stage of life: how to enjoy the new freedoms, how to cope with the losses, how to find new sources of identity, etc.
As a lifelong writer, I have decided to do what I have always done with significant changes in my life: write about it. It will be one of the topics we explore together in “Notes from the Prairie.”
Welcome aboard!
"Not Yet Old” is adapted from my book Creative Aging: 52 Ways to Add Life to Your Years, available at amazon.com/s?ref=nb_sb_noss
Has your initial experience of aging been similar or different? I look forward to learning from you....