The Last Posting

On May 11, 2026 By ednafroeseIn Aging, gardening, gifts, Loss, memories, Wisdom, writing2 Comments

If you haven’t read my previous post – “The Season of ‘All Done’” – please do so before reading any further. This post is its sequel.

Photo of a white crocus in bloom, against stones and an old log. — *Photo by Jessie Froese*

On January 19, 2019, I began Stones and Flowers with “These Fragments Have I Shored Against My Ruins.” Since then, I have published 109 posts, including this one, the 110^th, in which I want to return to the part of “all done” that I only mentioned in the previous post: the choices made with pleasure but now relinquished because it is the right time.

There was a volunteer position in our church that I loved. For once I was part of a committee in which I truly belonged, where I could serve with genuine pleasure. But then came a time, after about 20 years, when I recognized, reluctantly, that I had by now given the best of my creative energy, and it was time to let someone younger and more energetic take the position. Strange how certain I felt about my decision, and no amount of persuasive argument changed my mind. I was done, and integrity demanded that I say so, clearly.

My farewell to folk dancing was equally certain – yet also reluctant. The Saskatoon International Folk Dance Club had welcomed me and my husband (neither of us had any prior knowledge or experience of dance), from our first hesitant visit onward. Indeed, we were often urged to participate in dances long before we knew enough to do so without making everyone else in the circle stumble. We became fully involved, learning dances from around the world, performing at community events, joining potlucks and parties for refugees who were always delighted to see that Canadians could learn their dances, albeit not always skillfully. I smile to remember the forthright African woman who told us all that we “sure danced white!” I learned to enter different cultures, even different religious feelings, as the steps and the music became familiar.

Two photos of a group of folk dancers in Romanian costume. — Author on the left, her husband in the center

Author on the left, her husband in the center

Nevertheless, there came a time when it seemed right to say, “all done now.” Many reasons played into that conclusion. None of them matter now, more than a decade later. In any case, by now our bodies have told us clearly that neither Romanian foot stamping nor exuberant Jewish turns are a good idea. I am grateful beyond words, though, that those years of folk dancing enriched my world and enlarged my heart.

Without a doubt, there will come a day when I look at our gardens (front and back) and concede that it is time to say “all done.” That might well be the most difficult of all relinquishments. I hope that then I can still comfort myself by growing ever more houseplants.

Two photos of gardens, our back garden of veggies and our front yard with various perennials.

What I have learned over the years is that when we stop grasping, stop hanging on in desperation, our now open hands can receive new gifts. That bit of wisdom has been uttered in many places, but I credit C.S. Lewis for the most vivid image of it: a greedy child in a dragon’s lair, overcome with the sheer quantity of gold (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and then suffering from a golden bracelet that turned him into a dragon and seemingly can’t be taken off. Somewhere along the way, I heard a visiting preacher work through several Bible stories, pointing out the crucial difference between “gift” and “grasp.” I have forgotten his name but not the sermon.

There is so much that could be said about how to live out an awareness of that distinction. It will not be said by me, at least not in this medium. Stones and Flowers will cease to be an active blog after I publish this post. It is time. Seven years is a number of completion in ancient Jewish thinking; I will accept that. At some point, the blog will be deleted. For now I will leave the posts up, possibly for a few months.

Bright red poppies a day before the petals will fall off.

Finally, thank you to all of my readers. I have loved the challenge of thinking through issues that mattered to me. I have had many enjoyable hours with my camera, trying for just the perfect illustration. My special thanks to the few readers who made a point of responding personally, sometimes often, to some post or other, carrying on the conversation that I had begun. Those conversations have been precious.

May many more conversations continue among you and your friends and neighbours. Community is built by listening and talking and affirming what is good and kind. Farewell.

A mostly beige photo with tiny purple crocuses in the dried grass with a lichen-covered ancient rock in the foreground.

Stones contain eternity; flowers flaunt their fragility.

Both are beautiful.

To live well is to embrace both and all that is in between.

The Season of “All Done”

On April 23, 2026 By ednafroeseIn Aging, Choices, Justice, Limits, politics, possibility, reflection, WisdomLeave a comment

Taken April 4 – someone was clearly done with winter, never mind that there were still clumps of snow in the bushes nearby.

Spring in the prairies this year has been a frustrating on-again/off-again affair. Every two or three days of temperatures mild enough to melt snow and quicken buds are followed by yet another snowfall or even snow storm. Even those of us who enjoy winter have had it with snow. Enough already! Our souls are starved for the sight of green leaves and blooming tulips.

That feeling of “I am so done with this” reminds me of our first granddaughters who were taught some basic sign language long before they could actually say words. Simple gestures performed by pudgy baby fingers are unbearably cute, and my favourite was the sign for “all done.” That most useful phrase told parents when baby had had enough to eat and wished to be freed from the confinement of high chair or whatever other equipment can be used to hold a baby in place. “All Done!”: a quick flick of the hands as if tossing something away or warding off some onslaught. That’s the gesture I want to use toward Mother Nature: I’m all done already. Put the snow away until next November, please!”

Actually, these days I could write whole lists of things that I’m all done with. Some of them were once chosen with pleasure and hardly deserve the wilful dismissal of the gesture (those will wait for the next posting). Others, unfortunately, whether I initially chose them or not, I have had, and have, no say in their current presence or their long-hoped for ending.

As illustration, albeit an ambivalent one, take my retirement from university-level teaching. I had certainly chosen the teaching itself; it was never imposed. But at the end, it was not so much that I was truly all done with teaching as that various circumstances combined to make me choose to throw up my hands and dismiss my post. A good friend, now gone (see Stones and Flowers, “The Last Good-bye”) had told me that I would know, deep inside, when it was time to end something, whether a career or a participation in a club or a volunteer position. “If you pay attention,” she said, “and listen to your heart and your body, you’ll know.” And “sometimes,” she added, “it’s only later on that you’ll realize you were really done.” She was right. There came a time when I could acknowledge to myself that I was all done with classroom performances; as for the marking of assignments, that I had been done with long before I actually quit teaching.

As I walk further and further into the domain known as “old age” or “eldership” (if language must be kept positive), I’m recognizing more frequently those moments of “all done now,” not as a moment of choice but as a time of reluctant acknowledgement.

To say aloud, finally, that my body no longer tolerated the degree of discomfort that is intrinsic to camping was bitter. Tenting, at first a financial necessity for us, had become our normal holiday practice, and then a matter of pride as well as pleasure. My soul felt at home in the forests and near the streams, and there was something mysterious and beautiful about being completely, literally, in touch with the earth. I had once felt the aftershock of an earthquake directly underneath my body; I had felt the earth move.

For so long now, the choice to pitch a tent had been part of my identity. It let the world know that I belonged outdoors. Now that I have said “all done” to our beloved tent, who am I? What is it, precisely, that has been declared “all done”?

When held up against the large scale of world events, such questions are not exactly silly, just much smaller than I care to admit. Where I sleep remains a matter of choice; I can now afford other options than a tent. In other words, it’s not an issue of survival as it is for far too many people on this earth.

Here I want to say, loudly and clearly, that I am all done with political lying and side-stepping and excuse-making. I am done with the scape-goating of the vulnerable, the manufacturing of enemies, and the endless grasping for power. I am so done with mere posturing and ego-stroking and face-saving. I will not say that I am all done with death because death is an irrevocable part of life on this planet. However—and this is a huge distinction—we can be done with cruel and unnecessary death, stupidly violent death, undignified diminishment of human beings. Why aren’t we? That’s the question my soul cries out repeatedly, while my cowardly self whimpers that I’m all done with listening to the news.

There is another important hand signal for babies: it is the opposite of “all done.” The signal for “more” is not as dramatic as the disdainful flick of the hands for “all done”: fingers are brought together and then the tips are touched. It is a gathering motion, not a tossing away. And that, in one gesture, is the problem of our society. Babies, seemingly, know instinctively when they want “more”—more food, more play, more hugs, more water to drink—just as they know when they’re “all done,” for the time being, with any of the above. Greed is as yet unknown to them.

All those ugly things I said I was done with? they’re the result of too many people who have totally forgotten that the gesture of “more” should have limits. There’s a point when the floor is scattered with toys, many toys, and nearby rooms are piled high with toys, and no child alive can play meaningfully with even a fraction of them all. “All done” should have been signaled a long time ago. Somehow along the journey from babbling baby talk and happy hand clapping, something happened that sidelined self-awareness and good judgment, and now the adult is looking at power and money and influence and attention and just saying repeatedly, “more, More, MORE!”

Yes, I’m all done with “more.” Not that I haven’t vices of my own for which I haven’t always had the wisdom to signal “all done.” My children would point to my libraries and ask about how many more books I really think I need. They would be right. And I’m working on that. The question that troubles me is this: if I had had money enough early enough to get onto that track of wanting more and ever more, would I have had the discipline to say “all done now”? I should think carefully about that before I judge too harshly the choices of others.

Nevertheless, is it too much to ask that collectively we encourage our governments and our social institutions to teach us all the virtues of refusing the lure of endless “more”?

[I am aware that human societies are far more complex and

interconnected than my simplistic distinction between “more”

and “all done” implies. It will take much more than my helpless

“all done” gestures to bring about change.

For the time being, may I keep my mental picture of a

grandbaby signalling happily “all done!”?]

Convenienced into Helplessness

On March 5, 2026 By ednafroeseIn Aging, assumptions, Connection, Convenience, efficiency, Kindness4 Comments

To be here, on this mountain slope in Yukon, was not easy. Most certainly, it was worth whatever effort was required.

It is true that “convenience” is not a verb, not even an intransitive one. It might well be intransigent, though, in its subtle and unstoppable destruction of a society that once fostered kindness in our simple interactions with those who offered us a service.

I begin with an anecdote from my earliest teaching days. As a new sessional lecturer in the English Department of the University of Saskatchewan back in the days before personal computers sprouted in every office, I was deeply grateful—almost every day—to the secretarial staff in the department office. I told them which textbooks I wanted to use, and they ordered them for me, made sure that I got a free desk copy for my own use, and submitted the list to the bookstore. How that all happened, I don’t know. I do know that we discussed my choices, and I was reassured that all would be well. And it was so. I was free to prepare the actual teaching.

Near the end of the term, I submitted my typed copy of the final exam (some faculty turned in hand-written copies) to the secretaries for transformation into officially printed copies. Once I had finished marking the final exams, I filled in students’ final grades into the paper form supplied by the secretaries and then received by them. How those grade numbers arrived in the Administration Building was not my affair. I could pay attention to whatever student issues came up, such as deferred exams or questions about the next term.

Less than a decade later, during which I did the course work for my doctoral degree, I began teaching again, this time for a different college. I was informed, crisply, that I had to contact book publishers myself for any desk copies I needed, and I was responsible for sending my text list to the book store. After all, everyone now had her/his own computer and email address and could “conveniently” make whatever arrangements were necessary. Besides, the lone secretary in the office had many instructors to deal with and couldn’t be expected to provide that kind of service.

If I had thought that having to order my own books was a nuisance (yes, I know this smacks of privilege), that was because I hadn’t yet discovered that I was now also responsible for submitting grades directly to the Administration Office, using whatever software program had been designed for that exam period. My last phrase is deliberate: seemingly every time I had to submit grades, whether at Christmas or in late spring, the program had been changed and I had to learn a new interface. Hours and hours in the busiest season of academia were spent attempting to figure out what miniscule error I might have made that prompted the computer program to refuse my submission yet again. I thought about the hundreds of faculty on campus, each one sitting alone in front of a computer screen, swearing helplessly because the IT department had imagined that more “upgrades” were needed.

I will spare my readers the details of the day that my word processing program was updated, without prior notice, just as I was in the midst of writing a conference paper, with the deadline looming. For one entire awful afternoon, I couldn’t figure out how to access any of my files. I wished all kinds of horrible disasters upon the tech people responsible for my terror that I had lost all of the work of the previous weeks. Which one of them, I wondered, would submit willingly to have some stranger enter their home in their absence and rearrange, totally and irrevocably, their entire kitchen with all its contents—dishes, food stuffs, appliances? Would they not protest such a violation of their space in the name of “convenience”? Yet we poor, un-technically minded teachers and researchers had to submit not only to the monumental inconvenience of learning how to manage a new program but also to subtle implications that we were foolishly resisting progress or that we simply weren’t very clever.

I am grateful beyond measure to be retired now and freed from the tyranny of supposedly convenient technological enhancements to the act of teaching.

On the shores of a lake along the Alaska Highway, content with being there.

Unfortunately I am still repeatedly learning helplessness because of the illusory goal of convenience. And here I move from the classroom to the city street. As a farm girl, I had learned how to parallel park using strategically placed straw bales (the small rectangular ones, not the humungous ones that now dot the prairie). What was much easier to learn was how to pay for downtown parking in the big city.

Every car I ever drove, for decades, had a coin purse readily available. Putting coins in a meter was simple, even on cold winter days. Discovering that someone else had left time on the meter was delightful. If a meter was stuck and refused to accept more coins, that was not a problem for me. The meter reader would discover that malfunction before issuing a ticket.

Such simplicity is now gone. I still remember the day when I, now newly retired, planned to meet a friend on campus for coffee and discovered that new parking meters required me to use my phone to pay. There was no slot for coins. I did have a cell phone by that time, but it wasn’t yet a “smart phone.” And if I had had a smart phone, I doubt that I would have been equally smart in its use. I had no choice but to get back into my car, drive away to some neighbouring residential street that still had free parking and then walk back several blocks, now late for my meeting.

That helpless feeling has recurred repeatedly in the last years, as one form of “pay station” gives way to yet another version. In winter I loathe taking off my gloves to try to punch in my license plate number on an icy screen of some sort that half the time doesn’t work in the cold. That’s after I have walked a half a block in the opposite direction I wanted, just to find that pay station. Some of them still take coins, thank goodness, but I foresee a time when that option will also disappear. I will either cease going downtown altogether (go ahead, City Hall, whine about how people don’t come downtown enough) or simply refuse to pay for parking. At some point, I will doubtless get a ticket. Perhaps then I can actually find a person in City Hall and speak out against the relentless drive to keep changing technology in order to keep the tech dept. busy, and be damned to the vulnerable in the population.

I knew, at some intellectual level, that getting older would have disadvantages and that I would face an accumulation of losses. I had not reckoned with the soul-destroying helplessness that would accompany seemingly minor losses. Because the relentless drive for “convenience” (don’t ask for whose) inevitably eliminates personal interactions (think about the soullessness of online shopping or the maddening experiences of self-checkouts), the helplessness felt by the left-behind people is all the more acute. It’s one thing to have to ask someone for help. It’s another to find oneself alone with no one around to ask for help. No one, that is, except a disembodied voice from another country who finally speaks to me after I have listened through several menus and pushed numbers on my phone. And then I may not even be able to understand that disembodied voice.

If I once imagined that the elder years would be spent thinking about huge questions about meaning and focusing on deepening relationships, I have been disabused. We are instead called upon, repeatedly, to learn new technology in order to accomplish once simple tasks. I don’t even want to contemplate what it will be like to try to negotiate complex health issues when every institution has been incorporated into some rats’ nest of online documentation. All that “convenience” of being able to book an appointment online (instead of speaking directly to a kindly receptionist) comes at a high cost.

I suppose that I can look forward to hiring a young person with some suitable training to be my personal guide through the coming, hyper-convenient world. Oh, wait, that won’t be a young person, will it? It will doubtless be a robot, of inscrutable age.

“Convenience and efficiency are not virtues: efficiency is a tool to make money, and convenience lures us into spending it, often foolishly and for no good purpose.”

Photo of a car and a small backpack tent next to a picnic table. It is a camping site in the forest next to a lake. — Neither the getting here nor the staying here was convenient, yet the beauty and stillness of the place lingers in my memory.