Celebrating my birthday week. Day Two.

 

Continuing my birthday week celebration by having ice cream with my morning coffee.  

Life is good.

Future Plans by Kate Barnes

When I am an old, old woman I may very well be

living all alone like many another before me

and I rather look forward to the day when I shall have

a tumbledown house on a hill top and behave

just as I wish to. No more need to be proud—

at the tag end of life one is at last allowed

to be answerable to no one. Then I shall wear

a shapeless felt hat clapped on over my white hair,

sneakers with holes for the toes, and a ragged dress.

My house shall be always in a deep-drifted mess,

my overgrown garden a jungle. I shall keep a crew

of cats and dogs, with perhaps a goat or two

for my agate-eyed familiars. And what delight

I shall take in the vagaries of day and night,

in the wind in the branches, in the rain on the roof!

I shall toss like an old leaf, weather-mad, without reproof.

I’ll wake when I please, and when I please I shall doze;

whatever I think, I shall say; and I suppose

that with such a habit of speech I’ll be let well alone

to mumble plain truth like an old dog with a bare bone.

  "Future Plans" by Kate Barnes from Where the Deer Were. © David R. Godine, 1994