The dilemma has always been mortality.  When I was fifteen, my father was sixty-five.  He was in good health but that didn’t mean I wasn’t concerned about his age.  It wasn’t something that consumed me because he was not an ordinary retiree. He loved to work and hours and the physicality he exerted while farming was almost unnatural or superhuman.  Old men are supposed to slow down– he sped up.   Time seemed to have no hold on the man that I gained wisdom from and the value of working with my hands.  He, like many farmers, was a jack-of-all-trades and we could fix anything with a small toolbox and a socket set.  I don’t recall buying many new materials to build with, everything was repurposed.  The skill, the knowledge to make and create from something that was discarded was a daily necessity.   He had a comfortable pension that was a result of hard work and education.  He could have truly just enjoyed retirement.  The drive to always be productive and the reward of truly being physically exhausted at the end of the day is something that has been imprinted on me and something I try to emulate.  Some lessons were taught by being a farm boy.  Despite doing all we could do and seeking help from the veterinarian, animals in our charge did not and could not overcome the inevitability of mortality.  I remember vividly when I was twenty-five years old my father sat on a bale of hay to rest and said the words for the first time ‘I am tired’.  He obviously was not young but his drive and passion to just do and be constantly productive in nature was finally thwarted by his age.  The diagnosis of Parkinson’s soon followed.  I find myself depicting the conditions of mortality.  In some ways I am trying to understand it and other ways just cope with the realities of it.