Guest Post By My Mum: A Good Advice

or: How a Walk Can Lead To a Guest Post.

Last Friday, I had the day off. My original plan was to go for a nice long walk, something I'd not done in a while and was really looking forward to, especially when Thursday was a beautiful sunny day. Friday morning, though, was grey and wet. I resigned myself into simply enjoying a lazy day at home, but in the early afternoon, it cleared up a little and looked as if, although still grey, it would not be raining again in the next few hours. So I rang my Mum and we arranged to go for a walk together.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, maybe you'll know that I have a thing not only about doors and doorways, but also about wide open spaces. Every now and then, some of my most highly esteemed fellow bloggers provide me with wonderful pictures of such spaces (you know who you are!), something I am always happy to look at.

When we reached the fields, there was hardly anybody about, it being a Friday afternoon and not yet quite the weekend. Our area has a lot of industry and certainly not the best air quality, and the landscape is really as featureless as it looks in these pictures, but it is our home country, and we are quite attached to it.

The pictures give you a pretty good idea of how vast it is just a few hundred yards from town, and what kind of weather it was. As you can see, the sun was trying hard! There was even a narrow strip of blue sky showing! That blue strip widened quite nicely later on, but I did not take any more pictures by then.

At some stage, my Mum said she wanted to tell me something that I might find strange. But let her say it in her own words, in the shape of a guest post (her first since last July):

A Good Advice

The older I become, the more I look back at my past, my childhood, my youth, and the more I regret that there is no-one left of the generation before me. The reason is: I cannot ask about  things and events anymore, which happened long ago, or about facts from our town, for example, which former building or square was on a certain corner.

And I also regret very much that I didn't always listen properly when my mother told me old stories, because now it is too late, I can't ask her anymore. Though my memory reaches far, nearly until when I was three, there are some experiences rather vaguely in my mind ore quite lost. And sometimes when I am thinking about a specific matter,  I would be very glad to have one of my parents or relations to help me further.

My brother is only five years older than me, and he remembers some things better, but he is the same generation as well.

So I said to my daughters, ask all the questions you may have now, while our minds are still clear, before it will also be too late.

Perhaps that sounds a bit sentimental, but as I talked about this topic with friends my age, most of them told me that they have quite the same feelings. So I give all the young people my good advice: use the chance to learn about the past, otherwise it will be lost for all times.

- - - End of guest post - - -

Maybe you are not too surprised to hear that I never tire of hearing the "old stories". I may not always show as much patience as I should, patience never having been one of my strengths, but that does not mean I don't want to hear about the past (my own childhood as well as from long before I was born).

My Mum's advice has always proved to be good, and I will certainly heed this one!

By the way, my next book review will tie in nicely with this post.