Old age is getting costly

It's only been a week after I turned 55, and already I can tell I have lost my capacity to be rational. My caretaker asked me yesterday if he can go ahead and buy more chickens to replace the ones that died from the plague, and I started to get emotional. "No more animals. I don't want pigs, goats or chickens ever in my life. Too much emotional cost." I think I heard him say something like, but you eat them.

And then last night, I feel deep sadness and emptiness when Santino (this street kid I have sheltered) left to go back home to his mother and 8 other siblings because his mother forced him to. It's been my dream for these street kids to go back home and be reunited with their families---but only if their family functions like what it should be. Santino's mother is on her 5th live-in partner and pregnant with her 10th child. Which reminds me how the "octomom" kept her intestines from coming out with the baby when I, during my first and only one delivery thought that my guts came out with all that jelly fish looking placenta.

 A friend tells me the reason I am more emotional is because I am getting old. "What do you mean "getting"? I've been old."  Another friend tells me, "Acceptance is the key." Of course I know that too. I'm brilliant enough to know that when my dreams became dry and when I laugh, a tear runs down my leg, I, is no spring chicken.  But don't drink the cool-aid yet, I'm not ready to  move in with them folks in some home playing with their teeth on their lap. Cheers!