It’s been life changing. I have had 15 different housemates. They ranged in age from their early twenties to late eighties. Four of them returned after a time away. Most have stayed a year or two. The longest was with me for over six years. Three of them were twins like me! I have learned something from every single person and most of it was positive. Even the housemates that didn’t work out gave me practice in important skills like boundary setting, and a window into my own character defects that never would have been possible if I had lived alone. My most memorable experience in boundary setting involved a pig. I had a young girl who lived with me for a short time that I just didn’t feel comfortable with. It was a gut feeling. She rarely spoke to me. The longest conversation we had was when I interviewed her as a prospective housemate. After many months I finally decided I was not comfortable sharing my home with someone I barely knew and obviously was never going to know, so in line with our rental agreement I gave her a month’s notice. The day she left I had a day off from teaching and was unexpectedly home. I was kind of shocked to see her boyfriend, who had spent the night, come out of her room carrying a pot bellied pig under his arm. It was not a happy pig and squealed loudly as it was marched out of the house. Surprise, surprise, she had never mentioned pigs in her interview or in any of the months she had lived with me. Later I wondered if she might have been purposely planning to leave it in the bathtub when she left. It certainly solidified my gut feeling that she was not the right housemate for me. This was a rare negative experience. Most of my housemates have been great. They have often been in a major transition in their lives, having recently moved, changed jobs, or ended relationships. I like to think I have provided a safe and comfortable place for them to land. One of my housemates drove all the way across the country with two cats in her car to be closer to her daughter and her family. She found a new relationship in the process. Unfortunately he was allergic to cats. As a result of his allergy I inherited two lovable fur babies when she left. We still keep in touch even though she has moved back to the East Coast. My housemates have encouraged me and enriched my life in so many ways. The original cat Mom is a writer and artist. We used to set aside time to paint together and she is the person who helped me start this blog. We also took a trip to Sweden, Denmark, and Finland together. My longest running housemate, is a political cartoonist, a die hard socialist, and an avowed atheist as well as a former actor with an edgy sense of humor. He gave me lots of practice in defending my own political and religious views and helped me to not take myself so seriously. We still argue at least once a month or so on the phone. My greatest joy, however, was when one of my housemates became pregnant. I was able to be at the birth and hold the baby in my arms. “The baby” is now 25 and nearly six feet tall. Her Mom and I are still close and I consider them part of my family. I am so glad that I took the risk and stepped out of my comfort zone when I decided to put the first “house to share” ad in the paper. It has brought amazing new people and wonderful experiences into my life . . . and a couple of special cats to boot. Kitty and MarioMy inherited cats: Mario is now in cat heaven with my previous cats. The vest was not to make him look stylish. I tried to put a lease on him because he was protecting his territory from dogs in an aggressive way, but he just laid down and refused to move when I put the vest on him. He was very social and friendly with PEOPLE. Kitty is still hanging in there at 18. She has always been shy and anxiety ridden. She is an indoor cat and more of a one person lap cat.
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It sounds dangerous but the Beast Grip is actually a contraption that holds my phone and makes it easier to take pictures. It also makes it possible to add special lenses to my phone like a micro lens and a wide angle. Yesterday I headed out for a walk around my neighborhood with my Beast Grip in hand. It’s a route I have walked hundreds of times but I was on a special mission to find things I hadn’t noticed before, or see things I had noticed in a new way. This is what I found. Some of the photos are edited, which I also did right on the phone. Sometimes I really love technology! I had fun exploring this new world that I have not really seen before. It slowed me down. My body didn’t get as much exercise but my brain and my soul were very happy. This is the Beast Grip
. . .in my garden and in my lifeToday’s haul of veggies from the garden included my first green beans and two different kinds of tomatoes, Early Girl and the weirdly named but incredibly delicious Brad’s Atomic Grape tomato. I have also been eating home grown yellow summer squash and earlier in the summer I picked blueberries every day to put on my oatmeal in the morning. Life is good. I love watching things grow. The beans are especially fun. At first they look like “Barbie” beans, just the right size to serve to “Ken” and “Skipper.” Then they start looking like real green beans only shorter and flatter. Finally they get longer with little bean bumps signaling they are ready to harvest. There is something magical about putting seeds in the soil and nursing them into full blown plants that give back with food for the soul as well as food for the tummy. It surprises me that, like the veggies in my garden, I am also capable of growth even at 73. Not physically of course. My body is going in the opposite direction, which is true about other physical functions as well. I’ve lost an inch due to gravity and osteoporosis. Nope, the growth I am experiencing is psychological and spiritual. I didn’t expect this to happen in this phase of my life, when there is so much more time behind me than in front of me. I want to make the most of it, but in a small way. I don’t have grandiose plans or expectations.
Instead I am just accepting who I am, not waiting to become the person I thought I should be. I am appreciating what I have, not searching for something more. I am grieving the loss of friends and family with an open heart. I am finding joy in mundane everyday adventures like walking around the neighborhood checking out other people’s gardens. This isn’t what I thought I would be doing at this stage of my life but that’s OK. It is evidently what I was meant to do. I have a lot of stuff. To me it has meaning because I grew up with it but to the ordinary eye it probably looks more like junk. I had a fantasy that I was going to pass some of it on to my nieces and nephew but I doubt that they will want it. So I am taking photos and writing stories about the things that are special to me. I have two chairs that I value beyond gold. They are both older than me and I am 73. The Windsor Chair![]() The Windsor chair was always there, kind of like the sun, the moon, and the stars. The term “Windsor” comes from the name of the town in England where the style originated in the 1700’s. This particular Windsor chair predated our birth as you can see from the photo of my twin sister Lin and I snuggled into it outside on a cold Duluth Day. It followed Mom and Dad to California and for over 20 years was the telephone chair next to the sewing cabinet that held their phone - a land line of course, so you had to sit in the chair whenever you called someone. I now use it in my bedroom as my zoom chair for online meetings. It is comfy and understated. It bears many scars from years of constant use. The walnut stain on the arms has been rubbed away by all the Masons who sat in it on a daily basis. It’s legs are bruised by the many times Dad ran into it with his electric cart on his way from the bedroom to the front door of his apartment. Still it survives, a testament to it’s solid construction and classic design. I hope it gets a good home someday. It will definitely outlive me. Mom’s Louis XV ChairMy very favorite family heirloom is Mom’s Louis XV Chair. It has a long history and has traveled through our entire family. In the 1930’s, after she graduated from high school, Mom saw it, along with a matching sofa, being taken out of a home next door to the house where she was living and working, as a nanny in a fancy neighborhood in Duluth. The neighbors were getting new furniture. It was love at first sight and Mom practically followed the truck to the store and bought the used sofa and chair for her parents’ home. Grandpa Anderson redid the cushions. After her Mom died and her father was moved to a nursing home Mom took the sofa and chair to our house on 59th Avenue West. Dad reupholstered them in a tapestry. They are deeply ingrained in my childhood memories. But that was not the end of their journey. My older sister Sue and her husband Jim took them to Michigan and redid them in 1970’s gold velvet. Lin took them after Sue died so they spent time in her home as well. The sofa was given away but Lin kept the chair. She sent it to California thinking she was going to move in with me but she changed her mind. The chair was sitting in my garage and I knew I had to do something to rescue it so I spent more than the chair was actually worth to have it recovered in a swirly greenish print. It’s sentimental value is worth way more to me than it’s actual value as an antique. It has touched every member of my family and has spent time in every home. It’s still beautiful, not only physically, but also in the memories it holds. I wish it could talk. It would have a lot of stories to tell. Lin and I in the reupholstered version that Dad did. Sue and Jim’s 1970’s velvet version. The chair in it’s current transformation. I have a long “to do” list and I don’t want to do any of it. What I really want to do is talk to my sister Linda, who died in February. I am lucky that I can still hear her. I have been listening to some audio tapes she made in 1989 when she and her family lived in Osaka, Japan for 9 months while her husband did research at the University of Osaka. That’s how we communicated, mailing cassette tapes back and forth. It was the easiest and most personal way we could stay connected. There was no internet or FaceTiming in 1989. ![]() In the tapes she described her daily life. It was challenging just to do simple every day tasks. Laundry was one of them. The apartment had a mini washer but no dryer. She hung out the laundry on the balcony of their student apartment. Despite all the modern conveniences in Japan, for some reason clothes dryers were not considered a high priority. Everyone hung their clothes outside, rain or shine, even when it was snowing. Getting clothes to dry was like climbing Mount Fuji. Grocery shopping for a family of five that didn’t eat fish was another hurdle. She walked to a super market in her neighborhood where there was an entire aisle of seaweed but no peanut butter. Strawberries cost $1.00 each and a single cantaloupe was $45. Hamburger, a staple for her family in the US, was $10 a pound. She would buy a chicken breast and turn it into curry to feed the whole family. Their apartment was tiny, with five people squeezed into two small bedrooms. The kitchen/living room/dining area was only a little bigger than the size of their bathrooms at home. She had a two burner stove and a mini oven where she could bake 6 cookies at a time. The toilet was by itself in a little closet, with the bathtub in a separate room. It was one of the few places for some privacy. The tub was a Japanese soaking tub, short and deep. You showered outside the tub before you got in. Lin liked to take baths as a stress reliever. What surprised me was that despite the hardships she loved her life there. For the first time in her adult life she wasn’t working and she could just focus on taking care of her family. She talked about actually having time for herself. Even though the demands of being a Mom in a completely foreign culture were incredible, every day was a new adventure. She enjoyed exploring when she could, taking a train to Kobe where there were American goods available, including that elusive peanut butter. The apartment complex they lived in was for foreign students and there were lots of activities for the family. They met people from all over the world and would often get together with other families in the apartment building. The kids went to Japanese schools and had friends from the apartment and from school. They each learned varying degrees of Japanese and when they walked in the door, they all yelled “Tadaima!” (basically “I’m home!”) a traditional Japanese greeting. On one of the tapes she described a trip to the store as if she was on a travel channel, walking past the Budist cemetary with it’s tightly packed grave stones, seeing the women gather on the corner for a chat, and watching an old farmer in his garden. She noticed that many of the older women wore simple traditional kimonos while everyone else was dressed in modern clothes. On a rare occasion she would see someone wearing an elaborate expensive kimono headed to some special occasion. She had many opportunities to meet new people and got to know quite a few women during her time in Japan. And she was invited into their homes, a very special honor. She talked about a high school boy who came by regularly to speak English with her. His father wanted Lin to tutor him but she didn’t want to do that and instead spent time just talking with him. She learned a lot about the pressure put on Japanese kids to do well on tests that determined their future education and job opportunities. He went to school day and night and rarely saw his father, a “salary man” whose job included drinking with his fellow workers every night and golfing with them on weekends. It all seemed to be an accepted part of life in Japan. She was looking forward to the future and going home too, hopeful that she could get a job in the new school where she had helped develop their curriculum. As I listened to her tapes I wanted to warn her that the future was not going to be what she hoped. She didn’t know that 1990 was going to be one of the hardest years of her life, that our sister Sue would die, her family would be torn apart, and her life would be turned upside down. But you can’t talk to a cassette tape. You can only listen.
What I wouldn’t give for a chance to tell her how much I miss her and how much I admire her willingness to embrace and enjoy the challenges of living in a completely different culture. The tapes are a treasure. She is IN them, her triumphs and her disappointments, her strengths and her weaknesses, her humor and her anger are all preserved. Because of the tapes she still has a voice even though she isn’t here. |
Leslie Masona woman in search of her post-retirement future Guess what! By subscribing, you get notices about the latest Little Old Lady with Cats posts sent to your mailbox!
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(from an entry posted on 5/1/2015) “I definitely fit some of the characteristics of a little old lady with cats: Retired - check, Single - check, Like to knit - check, Have cats - check. . .I do not want to get stuck in my Little Old Lady persona, however. In fact, this blog is a risk taking experiment in exploring and redefining what I want my retired life to look like.” Categories
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