10 Years!

This month is an anniversary for me... marking 10 years of retirement! I retired from teaching on February 1, 2008.

As I recall, the first three months (until spring arrived) I headed into the basement every day to sort through boxes of files - my teaching materials. I hadn't had time to sort through them while I was still working... so I emptied my two filing cabinets at school into large boxes and carted them home. It took hours and days, but I eventually got through them...

To make matters worse, I wasn't sure what I'd be doing once I retired. It was hard to think beyond the working world. So I didn't want to get rid of everything. Instead, I again filed them away (which meant that I did eventually have to sort through them all again!)...

Would I volunteer to teach at a community program? Would Terry and I head overseas for a year to travel and work once he retired?

I filled a file folder with ideas...

I pictured retirement being like my life in my single years. Carefree travel... Freedom to do whatever I wanted (that I could afford) .

The things I didn't picture - I was incapable of picturing - was how my current life and responsibilities (owning a house, being married, needing to help my mother) would impact my retirement. I also didn't realize that Terry view of retirement was different from mine.

My mother was still living in her own apartment, a five- minute drive from our home. She'd just had surgery for breast cancer in December, and my life involved taking her to various post-operative medical appointments...

Here she is outside her apartment building, with my older son.

Like unpacking boxes of old files, taking her to medical appointments was not always an easy task.

She was very independent - not open to taking advice, even when offered by health care professionals or by me. I think she saw my role as one my father used to have - he drove her where she needed to go. We weathered those storms and, over the next nine years, I helped her downsize twice, first into an assisted living retirement home where meals and nursing care were provided on site. Then, when she could no longer walk and her sight was failing, into a nursing home. Thankfully, she was happy to move both times... In fact, she asked to move!

(Here she is, in her home at the assisted living residence, celebrating a birthday with my brother and other family members.)

During those years, my mother and I took a few trips, among them to Edmonton, to celebrate her older brother's 95th birthday. Here they are, the two siblings, aged 90 and 95!

Eventually I started blogging...

I also traveled... One or another of my children accompanied me on a number of short overseas vacations - as Terry hates to fly.

I returned to Jerusalem for a short visit with one of my sons.

Once winter was over, Terry and I began taking day trips and drive-able vacations.

Two years later, he retired... another change!

Eventually I began taking the art classes I never had time for when I was working, and I began to quilt more.

My friend Janet loaned me a book she was studying at her church, which introduced me to the 1600-year-old Benedictine approach to life - with its motto: Work and Pray -  and that became a "rule of life" for me. I  attended several Benedictine conferences where I had the opportunity to meet women whose books I had been reading. One of the most interesting was in Canterbury, England, where my daughter and I participated in a conference led by author Esther da Waal.

It has been an eventful 10 years! Not at all what I pictured 10 years ago as I was approaching retirement... But equally interesting.

 I wonder what the next 10 years will bring!