Life is a training field

Looking after my husband recalled to me my time as a volunteer at a local nursing hospital. My grandmother was a volunteer visitor there and I started to go with her and continued after she stopped going. Mostly she was visiting people that she knew but the staff would ask her sometimes to visit other people that had lived in the area where she had farmed with her husband. I did hear about my grandfather at that time (he had died when my mother was eight so I never met him). A lot of the people were in their 70s, 80s, and 90s that we visited together at first and then later I visited. I was thinking the other day that life is a training field for the future. One never knows how one will spend ones days especially once you retire from work. In my case I intended to spend it watching all the movies that I had purchased during my work time (we had over 1000 original VCRs but did give about half to my brother). But then my cousin got me going on the family genealogy (he wanted me to write a profile of my Pincombe family for the Westminster-Delaware History Books which I did) and I ended up doing 42 courses at the National Institute for Genealogical Studies (great way to learn about all the record sets and planning and carrying out your research) and about half way through wrote the Pincome Profile (published in 2005). As a result my retirement instead was doing genealogy. As DNA entered into the scene I became much more excited about doing genealogy to be honest. 

But back to spending time with the elderly. I am really glad that I did do that back in my teen years (for about four years actually while I was in High School, one day a week). It revealed to me the trials and tribulations of being old and having difficulties. I have been lucky thus far recovering from any problems that I have had and being quite active and capable. I feel that Ed will recover and get back a lot of his strength respecting that he is 77 years of age and we should be slowing down anyway. He is looking and sounding stronger every day now. We keep pretty much to ourselves and work away at our projects. Then we have time with our daughters and grandchildren although both are pretty busy and we do not see our grandchildren very often now that Ed has been ill plus COVID-19 makes that pretty difficult as well.