In her funny and wistful new book, Reeve Lindbergh contemplates
entering a new stage in life, turning sixty, the period her mother,
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, once described as "the youth of old age." It
is a time of life, she writes, that produces some unexpected
surprises. Age brings loss, but also love; disaster, but also
delight. The second-graders Reeve taught many years ago are now
middle-aged; her own children grow, marry, have children
themselves. "Time flies," she observes, "but if I am willing to fly
with it, then I can be airborne, too." A milestone birthday is also
an opportunity to take stock of oneself, although such
self-reflection may lead to nothing more than the realization, as
Reeve puts it, "that I just seem to continue being me, the same
person I was at twelve and at fifty." At sixty, as she observes,
"all I really can do with the rest of my life is to...feel all of
it, every bit of it, as much as I can for as long as I can."
Age is only one of many subjects that Reeve writes about with
perception and insight. In northern Vermont, nature is an integral
part of daily life, especially on a farm. Whether it is the arrival
and departure of certain birds in spring and fall, wandering
turtles, or the springtime ritual of lambing, the natural world is
a constant revelation.
With a wry sense of humor, Reeve contemplates the infirmities of
the aging body, as well as the many new drugs that treat these
maladies. Briefly considering the risks of drug dependency, she
writes that "the least we the "Sixties Generation"] can do for
ourselves is live up to our mythology, and take lots of drugs."
Legal drugs, that is -- although what sustains us as we grow older
is not drugs but an appreciation for life, augmented by compassion,
a sense of humor, and common sense.
And of course there is family -- especially with the Lindberghs.
Reeve writes about discovering, thirty years after her father's
death and two and a half years after her mother's, that her father
had three secret families in Europe. She travels to meet them,
learning to expand her self-understanding: "daughter of," "mother
of," "sister of" -- sister of many more siblings than she'd known,
in a family more complicated than even she had imagined.
"Forward from Here" is a brave book, a reflective book, a funny
book -- a book that will charm and fascinate anyone on the journey
from middle age to the uncertain future that lies ahead.
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