Eighty what???

Yesterday, Carlene drove down to Dot's (her sister) to spend the week. It's a three-hour drive.

Dot and I have a competition: who's the better host when Carlene visits?
If I don't do something like Dot does it, Carlene will teasingly say, "Well, Dot does it!"

When those two get together, they laugh so hard it's hard to tell what they are saying when they call.
One talks and the other says, "Tell her so-and-so" and then they both are talking at once.

Yesterday when they called, they told me they were doing a puzzle, then they were going to visit their brother Richard, then they were going out to eat.

"What's the puzzle a picture of?" I asked.

"Jesus and a little sheep," I think is what they said.  "And the words LOST NO MORE."

"They make puzzles of Jesus?" I asked....

But they didn't hear me because they were both laughing by then at something else.

If you could hear those two laughing or talking or singing, you'd think they were forty-something, not eighty-something.  I've been puzzling about why they stay so forever young:

They don't smoke, drink, or eat junk food--at least not that I know of.
They walk.  Carlene walks three miles a day.
They grew up on a farm eating organic before there was a difference.
They are Mimi's daughters--and Mimi lived a healthy life until she died at 96.

But they also like to show off!
I was telling them one day that I could no longer squat.  Both of them at once got into a full squat, and Dot said, "Like this?"

I have a picture of them squatting--a skill I've been trying to bring back into my repertoire of movement for the past four years--but I can't find it.

Here's Carlene doing one at my house--just to show you what I mean.

And here's a picture I took of Carlene holding a little toy school bus I gave her.  She likes to say that "every day we get on the little yellow school bus"--meaning that every day we learn something new.

I may not have the squatting down pat yet, but I do have the legacy of the little yellow school bus.
Whenever something happens that is "bad," Carlene says, "It's just tuition."
It's just the cost of learning.  Or--as Kevin Kling said yesterday, "Wisdom is not free.  You have to pay for it."

Dot and Carlene are two wise women.  They make me laugh.  I will try to stop being jealous that they can squat!