Just an Afternoon on the Back Porch Making Something Beautiful

Blog 25: Seventy and Still Playing

At 70, I decided to spend my birthday getting mosquito bites while gluing old magazine pictures to mason jars. It was perfect.

My daughter and I had planned this creative venture for weeks - a way to break the routine of a typical Wednesday and do something purely for the joy of creating. Nothing fancy, just an afternoon on the back porch making something beautiful for no reason other than because we felt like it.

The day cooperated perfectly. Hot summer afternoon, nice breeze, everything spread out on the lemon-patterned tablecloth—mason jars, Mod Podge, scissors, glitter, Mary Englebriet magazines and tall glasses of sweet tea. We didn't bring phones outside. The quiet hum of an oldies station was playing 60’s hits in the background.

Being over the 4th of July, the neighbors were gone, and we kept commenting on how quiet it was with no mowers, weed whackers, chain saws, leaf blowers going. Just this unusual silence that felt like permission.

Our chit chat was fun, often sparked by a song - but mainly remembering those trips we used to take when my daughter was younger. Remember when we found Mary Engelbreit's actual house in rural St. Louis? We were like detectives tracking down the ME store in the Galleria. We got caught up talking about sprint car racing then - that's how we ended up in St. Louis in the first place, on the way to the Knoxville Nationals in Iowa to see Tyler Walker race... the dude that did the backflips. And now he's back in Central PA...unreal...

We talked about the quiet and how different it felt with no one home on the street - the energy being so serene and pure - how utterly different that was from the day to day feel. And we agreed “we never do this anymore”, just sit and create something for the pure sake of creating it. How that art feels lost.

The Mod Podge got everywhere. I'd brought out cardboard and foam brushes, but it still ended up all over my fingers as I smoothed pictures from the magazines onto the glass jar. Sticky, gooey, messy, and I loved it. The cutting took forever - you can't just slap stuff on, you have to take time with the prep work, cutting carefully around little images. It requires patience to get a good result.

Every so often, a whiff would roll by from my mosquito dunk pots. I'd made them the week before, but they'd gotten smelly from all the rain. "I guess they're working," we'd say. Turns out they'd turned into a mosquito breeding ground. Later, those bastard little Asian tiger mosquitos started nipping at our ankles.

The lawn chair wasn't helping. I'm so short-waisted I had to sit on a cushion just to get my arms level with the table, and after a couple hours my back was aching. I stood up to work, walked around, stretched. "We need a snack," we both said at the same time.

These magazines ended up on Facebook Marketplace last year and almost sold. When I went to pack them up for the buyer, there was this internal tension - I just couldn't let them go. Something in my Cancer body said no. I had no idea why. It felt like a part of my life I wasn't ready to let go of, even though that whole Mary Engelbreit phase had created such clutter back in the day. I can still picture all those little shelves with little things sitting on them. What a cleaning ordeal that was.

But that afternoon, cutting through decades-old pages from the late 80s and 90s when life moved slower, when Mary Engelbreit's "Life is Just a Chair of Bowlies" philosophy felt like pure joy - cheery, fun, uncomplicated. I knew then why I trusted myself not to let them go a year before.

I didn't spend forever deciding what went where. Just glued images wherever they wanted to go, just went with it.

The jar found its home on my kitchen table a week later. I kept moving it around, trying different spots, different groupings, but ultimately it landed center table with this innate knowing it was meant for something. I had no idea what. For a full week, I'd walk by and wonder: what wants to live in here? Sometimes I'd forget about it completely, distracted by life. But it held its presence.

Then yesterday morning, my daughter walked in from getting the mail, carrying a hydrangea bloom in the most saturated magenta I'd ever seen. Not the pale pink it's been producing for the past three years, but deep, vivid magenta….my color.

"I picked this for you mommy," she said, the same thing she always says when she brings me flowers.

But this time I kind of squealed. "OMG this is my color - I could just drink this!" “This is the color of my soul!” And as the words left my mouth, I knew exactly where it was going. In my jar.

"I love it," she said. "I just love it."

The jar sits there now, holding that radiant magenta flower. When this flower passes, something else will show up. It feels like a container with its own knowing that speaks to me - we’ll both know when it’s time for the next thing. It will always be that way.

Sometimes the smallest afternoons hold the biggest gifts. And what we almost let go of becomes exactly what we need. There are times, too - you spend your birthday getting mosquito bites while making the perfect home for a flower that hasn’t even bloomed yet.

Love,
Sherry

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About the Author

She holds a field for women who are done disappearing.

Not in your face rebellion type of way - more the quiet refusal of refusing to shrink any longer.

After leaving the spiritual communities and two decades as a healing practitioner, she writes for women who have spent years dimming their light and are ready to remember what brightness feels like. For women who are done shrinking - to reclaim their wonder, creativity, and the simple joy of taking up space.

She writes small moments, sharp refusals, and the slow return of wonder in a world that commodifies healing and packages truth.

At 70, she has walked away from these systems promising salvation through endless optimization. What remains is a studio practice, seasonal rhythms, and words that carry frequency instead of instruction.

Her work moves fluidly between fire….naming systems and refusal….and softness….reclaiming the tender dreamer within.