Yesterday's visit to the doctor was ridiculously slow (I read a whole lot of Woolf's The Years while waiting in that office), but in the end it turned out to be uplifting. I appear to be in surprisingly good shape, and I got the good news that I'm continuing to slowly but steadily lose weight. (I don't own a scale, so the annual weight reveal is always a mystery to me.) Turns out my only obvious problem was a giant lump of ear wax.

Good health can be dumb luck, and I acknowledge my dumbness in that regard. I am no paragon of fitness or diet. I'm just accidentally fond of walking and vegetables. But it seems that hauling firewood and heavy wet laundry and the stupid vacuum cleaner is lifting weights, that gardening is core work and yoga, and I guess everything adds up. The small steps I've taken to drop pounds have been small steps indeed, but for some reason they are working. The dumbness of luck is hard to explain. And of course one of these days that luck will run out.

But it hasn't yet. So as the year of my 60th birthday draws to a close, I acknowledge my affection for this dogged body. She's hanging in, despite gray hair and sagging skin and sore feet and Coke-bottle glasses. She still runs up and down the stairs without thinking too much about it. She still dances around the kitchen. She still climbs a mountain now and again. Yes, she huffs and puffs and takes a lot of breaks. But she still manages to get to the top. I'm kind of proud of her.