Betwixt and Between — The Confessions of an Old Soul

I was making lasagne this morning when it happened.

The kitchen was warm, the sauce was simmering, and on a whim I put on my 1940s Spotify playlist. The first notes of Time After Time by Margaret Whiting drifted through the kitchen and just like that — I was gone. Not physically, but somewhere deeper than that. Transported to a time I never actually lived in but have always, somehow, missed.

It's a strange thing, grieving an era you were never part of. But I have, for as long as I can remember.

I was a teenager when I told my mum I'd been born in the wrong decade. That I should have been a teenager in the 1950s. She probably thought I'd grow out of it. I didn't.

What draws me isn't the lack of mod cons — I want to be very clear, nobody is taking my dishwasher or my washing machine. What draws me is something harder to name. It's the relationship people seemed to have with their lives. My grandmother's generation — raising kids, building houses, working hard from sunup to sundown — they weren't chasing something just out of reach. A life well lived was enough. Being content with what you had wasn't settling, it was wisdom.

Now? The cup is always full and always overflowing. Technology promised to make things easier and in many ways it has — but it also made the cup bigger. There's always one more email, one more meeting, one more thing on the list. And at the end of the day, even when you've done everything, it still somehow feels like nothing got done.

I'm not naive enough to think life was simple for women like my grandmother. It wasn't. The housework alone was relentless in a way we can barely imagine now. But there was a simplicity to the shape of a day, a rhythm to life that we seem to have lost somewhere between the invention of the smartphone and the rise of the 24-hour news cycle.

My grandmother had a word for it. She'd look at me and say I was betwixt and between — caught between two worlds, not fully belonging to either. Looking back, I think she understood it because she felt it too. She never said so outright — that wasn't her generation's way — but she always had the words ready when I needed them. Maybe betwixt and between was hers before it was mine.

I borrowed that phrase a long time ago and I've never given it back. I feel it in the music I reach for, the furniture I restore, the clothes I'm drawn to, the pace I'm always quietly trying to find my way back to.

I am, at heart, an old soul.

One who refuses to give up her dishwasher.

And maybe that's enough. Maybe the whole point isn't to figure out which era I belong to or to make peace with the one I'm in — maybe it's just to live it my way. A little bit 1940s, a little bit now. Sinatra on the playlist, lasagne in the oven, and the quiet, stubborn knowledge that a life well lived doesn't have to look like anyone else's. My grandmother knew that. I'm still learning it. But I'm getting there.