Learning Never Retires

Somewhere in Wisconsin, a retired science teacher is standing in her garden on a gloomy morning. She’s pruning tomatoes while a city crew removes a tree nearby and a row of irises bursts into bloom.

That’s retirement for me. Try not to be jealous.

The days aren’t always exciting, but they’re generally predictable. Retirement often settles into rhythms. Morning coffee. Garden walks. Library trips. Time with family. We get into our comfortable routines and can get through the day without controversy.

The funny thing is that even in these predictable days, life still finds ways to surprise me.

Then the sunny days come and you have SO many garden tasks. The weeds have taken a stranglehold on your garden. The flowers need deadheading, and the tomatoes need pruning.

I recently learned something new about deadheading flowers. I was this many years old when I learned how to correctly deadhead a petunia. I had been doing it wrong for most of my gardening life. No wonder they got all scraggly.

Tomatoes are another plant that needs care. Many people plant them, put cages around them, and leave them alone. I am more of a “tomato barber.” I’ve found that pruning suckers and lower leaves helps produce healthier plants and a better harvest later on. You have to be a little ruthless, or they ramble all over the garden and produce smaller tomatoes.

When I was teaching, I was regularly learning on the fly. There were 130 student names to learn in a week. New initiatives to implement as soon as they arrived. Lunches were often consumed in minutes so I could find time to address student needs.

When I finally retired, I discovered there were new things to learn. One of the hardest was slowing down. I actually had to teach myself to eat lunch at a normal pace.

Even after a lifetime of teaching science and decades of gardening, I’m still learning.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about retirement is discovering that learning doesn’t stop just because your career ends. There are still new skills to learn, mistakes to correct, and better ways to do things.

Apparently, even after all these years, I can still learn how to deadhead a petunia correctly — and that’s not a bad way to spend a morning.