Diamonds and Rust: We Both Know What Memories Can Bring: Rust, Compliance, Resistance, Resilience

Abstract

We are all dying of this terrible disease called aging. —Leonard Cohen Just past sixty years old, I have done fairly well in the non-failing physical department, which I attribute in part to taking to heart Thoreau’s directive to walk far and daily to shake off the rust of one’s chamber. The work of many scientists corroborates that a stuck body corrals a stuck mind, as Florence Williams reports in The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative. Too much sitting and staring at screens strains eyes and back. Moreover, we miss winged things in flight, changing outdoor light. The body itself seizes up, in the manner of other rust-bound things. Taking a woods ramble or an outdoor swim is curative. Outdoors, we can even work on horticultural rust, garden fungus on roses, phlox, lilac, and bee balm, if we choose. But despite my knowledge of what works for me, a recent summer was a veritable junkyard. May had begun with my then regular seacoast New Hampshire plan of swimming in Mendums Pond as soon as it warmed, and even before—in a shorty wetsuit and neoprene gloves. I was going to plant new flowers in the yard and bike and hike, maybe visiting cooler places, like the UK, as the heat built. My partner and I had very definite plans to drive south for his daughter’s graduation from her medical residency and a college housemate of mine’s sixtieth birthday and also for ferrying to Martha’s Vineyard in late June for my brother’s outdoor wedding.