What's It All About?

Retirement is about many things to many people.  For some, it may be a time for hobbies that you've had precious little time to devote to. For others, it may be about traveling to exotic places.  Sometimes, it's just about not having an alarm clock to wake you up each morning at the crack of dawn.  For me, it's about time with my family and grandchildren, first and foremost, with a little bit of everything else thrown in for fun!
The smell of fresh ground coffee and the drip, drip, drip of the coffee maker in the morning, wakes up your senses in a whole new way, once you have reached those glorious retirement years!  It's amazing how, when I look back, that I never really noticed how wonderful a fresh pot of coffee could smell and taste!  
I enjoy sitting on my patio, listening to the birds singing a beautiful song, just for me, I am sure, and calling all their friends to the bird feeder, once they discover that it has been refilled with a tempting assortment of bird food.  But their feeding is usually interrupted by those little rascals called squirrels, who are smarter than a 5th grader and able to figure out how to steal food from a squirrel proof bird feeder!!
Sleepovers at Grandma's are a treat for all of us....the grand kids get to stay up late, do whatever they want and Grandma gets to spoil them in the morning with a breakfast of homemade waffles, smothered in butter and real maple syrup from Vermont.
The Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays are the icing on the cake!   It is a blessing not having to go back to work the day after Thanksgiving and having all the time in the world, over Christmas, to "haul out the holly" and shop and bake til the "cows come home"!!!
Meeting friends for lunch, in the middle of the week, is a simple pleasure that I treasure.  Or watching my 3 year old grandson "mow" the lawn with his toy lawn mower, going back and forth, up and down, over and over and over... makes me smile and grin, like I did on the day he was born.
People would ask me, when they found out we had 5 boys, "are you Catholic or crazy?", to which I would reply "both".  But I knew God had a reason why He blessed me with 5 sons, and I knew one day I would find out what that plan was.  Retirement has made everything crystal clear.  Thank you God.