Content and always creating

ACCEPTING the transition into aged care is a task likely to overwhelm even the most pragmatic among us.

But for Sara Mason, a resident of Stella Anderson Nursing Home, knowing she would one day reside in facility’s Boronia Wing helped her embrace this phase of her life.

“We come up the rise and I said to myself ‘this is where I’m supposed to be’, I knew it from my visions,” she said.

“I was content right from the time I got here, and then when I was still at my home, they gave me the perfume of the brown boronia and I’m in the Boronia Wing.”

A person with strong sense of spirituality, Ms Mason said she listens to her guides, the spirits who travel with her, and through them finds an awareness of knowing that connects her to this life.

“This life, I knew it was going to be a long life and I’m supposed to get to 91 and a half, so I’m 84 now so I’m getting there,” she said.

After she moved into her room in Boronia Wing, Ms Mason started a fernery outside her window, which led to her caring for the gardens at the nursing home, a pastime she said is good therapy.

“Even though I’m in chronic pain I’ll never give it up because I’m not one to sit still,” she said.

The pain Ms Mason said she feels comes from a curvature in her spine, slipped disc, cracked vertebrae, an injured coccyx, and widespread osteoarthritis.

“I’m still getting around, you know? And I’m thinking, that’s what I want to do, and my spirits they’re here, they help me so I’m not complaining,” she said.

Her mornings involve waking, checking the residence’s towel warmer, breakfast, physiotherapy, and going outside to potter in the garden and feed the birds, which includes a family of magpies who wake her with their song.

“They sing, they sing,” she said. “I just talk to them, like when I feed them I say, ‘now hurry up and eat,’ because if crow comes in it’ll be over.”

Stella Anderson’s gardens are flourishing, and Ms Mason said there is one plant in particular that catches visitors’ attention.

“The garden over there, they admire that begonia,” she said. “I grew that from a cutting and then I used banana water.”

Ms Mason said she sometimes wonders how she’ll find time to tend to all her projects, but she keeps going.

“I just love creating, that’s all,” she said. “I’ve always loved creating and I couldn’t change, I couldn’t change I think to myself, what would I change?”

“If I’m content the way I am, you know, there’s nothing more that I could do.”