Tomorrow I turn seventy.  Scaling the heights or heading downhill? It depends on one’s circumstances and attitude. I’m one of the lucky septuagenarians, unlike my favorite poet Robinson Jeffers who wrote when he aged, “I cannot walk the mountains as I used to do.” That and the loss of his beloved wife Una just about did him in. I still have my beloved Jerry, and if no longer able to reach the top of my mountains, I can still walk them in grateful awe.

I can appreciate the arrival of spring when winter melts away, and ice doesn’t render a pratfall no longer funny, but potential disaster. Contemplating seasons in life and nature, I’m more sharply aware than ever of how I appreciate each of the four as they appear and slip away. I love the blue sky of spring, but in late summer I watch for its paling into Faulkner’s Light in August.

So, keen to remind myself how boundless life can be in any season, I resolve to do seventy fabulous things in my seventieth year starting tomorrow.

See you in the mountains.