It was my birthday yesterday – 1^st October. I’ve now been in this world for 67 years, and boy have I learned some stuff. I survived the years of being ‘young and dumb and just wanting fun’, plus the years after that of work and paying a mortgage, and now I’ve reached this third era of life with no road map. The lightness and sense of freedom which comes with that has surprised me, even while I acknowledge that my body will only do cartwheels of delight in my memory. However, it still gets me around with relative ease, and, all things going well, I anticipate it doing that for some time to come yet.

Day by day I shed a little more of the burden of caring about the sorts of things I used to care about. It’s great. I’ve become the kind of older woman who irked the hell out of me when I was younger – i.e. the kind who didn’t feel the need to buy into my youthful dramas.  Whether such ‘gay abandon’ is a good thing, or not, I like the feeling, anyway. It’s more liberating than I could ever have dreamt.

It also tickles my fancy that I’ve become the sort of woman who gets a hand-drawn birthday card with a vampire bat on it. Make what you want of that 😊

Today, I had my ten-year-old twin grandnieces for the day, as it’s school holiday time here again. My sister – their nana – comes over from Westport for a week or so, as well, to kid-sit. The girls and I went to the mall, where they got a haircut and some junk from the cheap junk shop (I know, it’s obscene), and then we checked out the bookshop, finishing with a movie.

I bought a book about mushrooms in New Zealand (Aotearoa) from the bookshop. The girls thought that was obscene, as mushrooms “grow in poop”. I tried to de-bug their brains from that line of thought, assuring them that fungi were in fact fascinating, but they wouldn’t have it. They thought it was beyond belief to spend $44.99 on a book about mushrooms.

I have no idea why I find fungi fascinating, and I’ve never been fungi foraging, either. Neither do I have any immediate intention of doing so, but the pictures in the book are out of this world, and that’s enough of an excursion for me. I justified the book purchase as a birthday present to myself – as if I need to justify much of what I do anymore.

I guess I look upon book buying in a similar way to those who buy other things which they get a sensory pleasure in doing. I confess I don’t always read every book I buy, particularly non-fiction, but pragmatism doesn’t always win over my eyes’ desire. Mostly, I do read my fiction books, though, which I often donate to the library afterwards, as I’m careful to keep them in good condition. Occasionally, a non-fiction book gets donated, too, after I’ve enjoyed seeing it in my bookcase for a while.

Today’s fungi book is not the first one I’ve bought. The previous one doesn’t have a dazzling array of pictures in it, but has a much more ‘picturesque’ narrative, which I also admire.

And completely off-track from the subject of mushrooms, I also have Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’ in my bookcase.

So, that’s another birthday wrapped up. I was going to have a gin last night, just because I thought I should at least do that much in recognition, but never got around to it. Tonight, I would normally go to my qigong class (qigong is like a simpler form of tai chi), but it has been cancelled, so perhaps that gin will slip over my lips after all.  Whatever happens, happens – no drama. Not with the gin, anyway 😊