I am reassured by the youthfulness and spirit of adventure (resilience?) present in the gene pool to which I belong.
Last week I was talking to my Aunt who informed me that she goes out walking with her various positive-minded friends six days every week. Furthermore, in order to keep in shape, she skips every night as she has done for years and eschews drugs of any form, preferring to let her body deal with illnesses on its own. She is 79 years old.
My father has a most amazing garden which is gracefully banked down into the valley behind their house and stocked with all manner of exotic plant species. Towards the bottom there is a pond where my older siblings famously experimented to see if their baby brother would float. Thanks guys. It sits on the edge of a small lawn and has a bank, rich with flora, rising steeply behind it.
Amongst other things, the job of garden steward involves tending both the pond and the bank behind and my father accomplishes this, from time to time, by laying a plank over the water and walking across. Now, it is fair to say that he no longer has the reflexes of a cat, but he refuses to let this prevent him from doing what he loves.
So picture this, if you will. He was slinging a net across the pond to catch the autumn leaves. He had one foot on the plank and one foot against the far bank and he was holding onto a small shrub for support… when he caught his foot in the net.
The shrub decided to jettison its branch under the the pressure exerted and my father looped backwards into thin air, presumably still holding the newly detached bough aloft next to a speech bubble exclaiming ‘crikey!’
In my imagination he whooped with laughter and performed a perfect back flip and two round hitches before diving into the pond… indeed, most of that must be true as he did indeed land backwards with a splash!
I’m guessing that as an accomplished gardener and having wet the, er… cutting?… in his hand, he then planted it somewhere before going off in search of dry clothes. And sympathy, aka a cup of tea, as I’m sure my mother would have just howled with laughter!
Safe to report that, at 82, he is still resilient enough to have been back out completing the job once dry clothes and tea had been administered. Which is my point entirely… I really have chosen a great gene pool!