Letting go...

As I said, I wanted to think about the lady I’m currently helping out in her yard and garden area. Apparently this woman has been working all of her life at the same job. “Forty eight and retired” is all she really said to me when we first met. She was sitting at the table smiling kind of softly like she was looking back at the nearly the last five decades of her life, she had only been retired a week.
From the sounds of it, she didn’t want to leave but it was forced upon her. “I was called in the office and asked to sign my computer off before I left”. She didn’t want to go into the details of the meeting; she just said it was all a huge shock to her system. Like someone came up from behind and hit her in the back with a board to knock the breath out of her. I told her good riddance on the job they lost an important cog in their net work. Again she smiled at me and looked down; she kept telling me “I don’t know what to do next, where to go”. The thought of that made me pity her even more.
To get up every week day for all those years, walk in do your work and walk out and accomplish what ever mundane tasks were required before the next day of work makes me think about my own life. After the lawn business and the café, where to next? Do I settle down and hope that maybe a son or daughter of mine would like to carry it on? Or grab a partner and just “retire” myself letting them handle everything.
Oh I know I have a long wait for all that, but to talk to her and listen to her stories. I see it all goes by so very quickly, in a flash your life can change without notice. When you are young death never creeps into your mind, in fact you feel invincible. Death is for the old or sickly. I’ve seen it far too well and know far too well that isn’t the case.
She rattled on about not trusting people in the work place; everyone smiles and is jolly – to your face. Then it’s all squabbles and cat fights to see who can get ahead. She told me she tried her best to keep to herself on all non office matters. It’s not that she was a snob or a prude but she’d see the inner workings of the other office people, she knew what they were capable of.
I look at her and see a woman that dedicated her life to her position. She never married; in fact she said the guy she was engaged to was caught cheating so she delved more in to her work to forget. She made some good friends along the way, made a lot of memories.
I guess life is funny like that, one minute you are working and another person is walking that same direction with the board in their hand to give you a shake or a rattle. Some people are evil and devious and can only be happy shaking that board and swinging it at others. All you can do is sit back and hope the board swings the other way.