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Show Kathleen Norris Says: Keep Your Marriage Alive Bell Syndicate WNU Service.) Plan for old age. And by old age I mean the late fifties, the sixties and the seventies, uhich don't seem like old age at all uhen you get to them. How about cruising around in the car, just seeing what sort of a little place we could pick up. By KATHLEEN ORRIS THERE comes a bad time in the life nf almost every woman. It comes when the children grow up, graduate gradu-ate from college, depart to lives of their own. And when at the same time, youth and beauty say an eternal good-by good-by to hermirror. Oh, she's not old! She's forty, for-ty, or forty-two, or perhaps only thirty-five or eight. But -life suddenly goes flat for her. She moves through the familiar famil-iar domestic round dully. The daughter is away at school; Bill goes off to the office; Jean faces a long stupid day. Of course she may go out to the kitchen and talk meals with Carrie. Cold beef and the broccoli and the last eclair; that will be plenty of lunch. The Millers are coming to dinner, so they must have something nice. Carrie makes suggestions, and Jean approves. She looks in the hall closet; yes, there are cards and scores. She telephones Ethel; is Ethel going to the club? She looks at the list of movies in the papers and the radio programs; nothing thrilling. "Papa lived to be seventy," thinks Jean. "Am I going to have thirty years more of this?" Middle Age Has Its Joys Too Now, middle-age has a job, just as youth has. Good times and getting get-ting married and first homes and first babies are all very well, but they only belong to certain years of life. You can't carry the thrills and glamours of early wifehood, early motherhood, into the forties and you only make yourself ridiculous if you try. But the forties have their own satisfactions and joys if you will take the trouble to find them, and one of the most inspiring of them all is a plan. A plan for old age. And by old age I mean the late Fifties, the Sixties and the Seventies, which don't seem like old age at all when you get to them. They seem just like well, living, like any other time of life. Comfort and friends and mental security and even beauty beau-ty mean as much to you as they ever did perhaps more. To be able to do as you like at sixty is just as pleasant as it is at twenty. To have a small farm, a dog or two, a cat or two, flowers to train, friends to come into barbecue luncheons on Sunday is to still be expressing your own personality, just as you did as a young wife. To travel when you feel a great need to see the Canadian Cana-dian lakes or Mexico City, to send friends preserves made of your own fruit to putter about in the strip of your own woods, to dress your white hair as becomingly as your darker hair ever was dressed and to wear the comfortable brocades and velvets vel-vets becoming your age all this is very keen delight Plan Together. And all this is especially delightful delight-ful if you take the old partner of your younger joys and sorrows along with you. If you want to put a thrill into a marriage, that has gone a little stale and monotonous, try discussing dis-cussing your plan with the man of the house tonight. Ask him where and how he would like to live when you both get really old; farm, seaside, sea-side, mountains? How about chickens chick-ens or squabs or raising fine kittens or puppies? How about having your own vegetables, corn and lettuce let-tuce and tomatoes? Thousands and thousands of families have had their own vegetable patch, their own berries ber-ries and fruit and enjoyed the luxuries lux-uries of the table for almost no outlay out-lay at all. How about cruising around in the car, now that the weather is getting warm, and just seeing what sort of a little place we AFTER FORTY . . . You dread old aire? How can you make the years after forty satisfying and full "sparkle?" Ifill your marriage mar-riage survive the change from youth to middle age . . . and after? Read Kathleen ISorris' frank, to-the-point ansu-ers to these age-old questions. You'll learn that the sixties and seventies can be the "highlights" of one's life! could pick up, and what we'd have to pay monthly to own it in seven or eight years? If you've been paying $35 a month for a city apartment for 15 years you've paid away $15,000 for nothing. That is, nothing permanent. That sum would buy you an enchanting farm of perhaps a hundred acres; I have seen delightful old places, with old brick houses on them, and streams, and elms, and fruit and view and woodland for one-half of that sum. Age Brings Different Interests. Of course you weren't interested when the children were small, and schools and dancing lessons and dentist den-tist and shops and doctor were all important and had to be within immediate im-mediate reach. But it's different now. Now you want to think of the quieter years, of puttering in the garden, of reading read-ing by an open fire, of having the few old friends you really love down for real hospitality and sending them home with arms full of lilac and jars of strawberry preserve and huckleberry branches. Now you want to think of the grandchildren, or the grandnieces and nephews, who are very stiff uncommunicative un-communicative little persons In the sittingroom of a town apartment, but who will come rioting out to you gladly for the happiest holidays their small childhood will know if you give them a chance. The places you look at by the way, will be picturesque outside and ruins within. You'll have to remodel re-model by degrees; a bathroom this year; a brick terrace next; electric light whenever the company runs a line out that way. But all that is part of the fun, and if you buy a place with a real crop on it and a tenant" farmer, your taxes will be paid from the beginning. A Real Home. And when you've finished you have a home, a place whose windows and stairways reflect yourselves, your likes and fancies; a place where a superbly scornful cat sleeps on a fireside bench, and a big dog draws himself up to welcome you when you come in. A place in whose garden you have perspired and panted and all but broken your back in the spring sunshine, and under un-der whose oaks you've had many a summer supper. A place whose sunrises and sunsets, whose glorious glori-ous winter storms and spring blossoms blos-soms belong all to you. All small children ought to live in such a place, and all aging folk. The .cities, the excitement and pressure pres-sure and strain, the shops and movies and taxis and beauty parlors, par-lors, the competition and struggle, these belong between the ages of fifteen to forty; they are good, and they belong to our normal American life. But they aren't the best of it The best of it is to reach the age when you may pause to discover a hundred hun-dred likes and hobbies for yourself; your-self; discover that you like outdoor cooking; that you like to dress in peasant dirndls or old Chinese cottons; cot-tons; that you like raising ducks; that you feel gloriously young after an hour"s woodchopping, or helping in the hay field. Incidentally, the chief discovery you may make is the companion, the enthusiastic partner and admirer admir-er and assistant you have in the old man. |
