I’ll be 80 on June 11. I can’t stop it. But I can meet this enormous milestone head-on. One step — no, 175,000 steps — launched the penultimate excursion of this important year. With my old friend, Claire, I took off to England in early May on a Cotswolds walking trip.

Claire and I had talked about viewing British gardens for at least a decade. It was time. We trekked from village to village in the very green countryside, among sheep, cattle, horses. Peace and quiet. Lilacs and flowers we didn’t recognize. Or climbing over stiles in the wooly-wogs.

A gift to ourselves like no other…

We had no responsibility but donning our hiking boots after a full English breakfast every morning like in Winchcomb’s Lion Inn, the pub part built in 1577. For five days we nabbed our walking sticks, our backpacks with water bottles, and cleared our minds for six to eight hours outdoors.

Along the way, I came up with three issues to tackle during my last chapter of this miraculous life: Adventure; Men; and Aging.

Adventure didn’t exist for me during adolescence, when you’re supposed to do wild things and test reality.

“You believe in magical realism,” Claire told me. She’s right, and magical realism, optimism, or whatever you call it, pushes me ahead, gives me hope. So perhaps I’ll get a job at Blackwell Books in Oxford, England next year, sometime after my Southwest Harbor birthday party, or celebrating the great honor of my daughter, Brook Wilensky-Lanford’s June 9th publication of A God-Shaped Nation. Five Hundred Years of Religion in America (Grove-Atlantic Press, dedicated to me!!).https://Brookwilensky-lanford.