Message from Crones' Council

What's Your Legacy?

Crones of the Flathead

Ina Albert

For years, four Flathead women in their seventies met to share our life stories, our tragedies and joys, our concerns about aging, about children, about death, and the goals we want to accomplish in this last part of life. This poem is dedicated to the intimacy and comfort we found together.

We sit as council on our lives, searching backward to find the roots of our being; looking deep into the core of what brought us to this time.

Together, we stare at old photos, trusting we will find threads that, strung together, will answer the questions that remain.

Splinters need pulling to expose raw truths.

We tell our stories to each other, harvesting their meaning one by one to make sense of our seventies, the weavings of substance to create a tapestry of each life.

It is a secret confessional.A sharing beyond sharing. Beyond shame or guilt. Not a place for cowards where souls are bared and tears are the currency of trade.

We are healthy and handsome and humbled by this time together.

A time to harvest our lives—to peer through the lens of coming old age, to choose our most valued possessions as keepsakes for our heritage chest of memorabilia.

Only our most sacred memories and nubs of wisdom will dwell there.

We are strong now. Full of energy honed with years of caring for our bodies. Yet we see creasing skin sagging over muscles, hair turning ashen.

We chart each sign of aging, of memory loss, of fatigue, the wear and tear that scrolls its record in the furrows on our faces.

We are more careful now. Careful of our bodies, our money, our relationships. Careful with our children.

Too soon we will be their children, trusting that they will be careful mothers and fathers.

Then it will be time to open our treasure chests and offer their inheritance, hoping the gold of our lives will be their treasure.

February, 2026