The Year of Recovery

Wow! That was some head cold. You take a little night time cold medicine in 2014 and wake up in 2016. What happened to 2015? Was it a year to just skip?  Maybe. Maybe not.

Leading up to the beginning of 2015 Mr Y. and I had decided to designate it as the Year of Recovery. The idea was we would use 2015 to recover from a couple of years of fast living in New York City, re-establish ourselves back into our smaller midwestern town, and get an idea of how we wanted the post retirement years to play out. Life has a way of throwing in an very different definition of a year of recovery.

It turned out our Year of Recovery would be from a variety of life events we could never have anticipated or dreamed up had we wished to. I eventually recovered from a couple of raging head colds in early 2015. Mr Y. started an amazing recovery from an April heart attack right after a quick stent was placed. Needless to say, the rest of the ailments were secondary. But every day we can tell our bodies are succumbing to the aging process. Some of them we can recover from, some we will deal with on an ongoing basis. By that definition every year from here on out is going to be a Year of Recovery.

We happily recovered from the shock of learning in August that we will be second time grandparents in February. We recovered from jet lag after a lovely trip to the Alaska home of a classmate this summer. The kinks in my back worked themselves out after moving a parent from her residence of 57 years to a spiffy apartment, even though the recovery took a couple of weeks longer than it would have even a couple of years ago. We recovered from the sticker shock of how much it would take to have someone else do a little landscaping for us, but that was probably nothing compared to the chiropractor bills had we elected to do it ourselves. We did end up recovering and re-establishing friendships that had been on a two year hiatus and we are working out a post retirement lifestyle that suits us.

We haven't decided a theme for the year 2016. After last year it seems like tempting fate to try and control what the year might be like. Whatever the year brings we will work on having healthy hearts, happy hearts, grateful hearts, and peaceful hearts.

Maybe we will just call it The Year of Unanticipated Happenings.