* OLD AGE *

Sometimes, there is no sharp boundary between the time of the blooming of all forces of man and old age. Smoothly, slowly, and quietly, a man approaches his old age. Time moves at different speeds in all seven periods of life. Years of maturity are most numerous, but they fly faster than years of childhood or old age. How can this be explained?
    "Life is not only for youth, but death is also not only by old age"—as the saying goes, but it is not entirely comprehensive to a modern man. So much can be said to decipher this proverb. For example, youth cannot be considered a period of monopoly with the possession of happiness and joy unless you see happiness as something fixed and unchanging throughout life…
     People believe the essence of happiness is different in different periods of life.
    "Sasha sat down on the sleigh, flying like an arrow fast, full of happiness, from the mountain of ice," wrote N.A. Nekrasov about childhood. But how can you experience the same happiness, sliding from the mountain, for example, at an age when Sasha or Masha says, "She will pass by and like the sun shines on! She will look at you, and you feel like a million rubles!"
And at the time of old age, not any peasant woman in her right mind would dream of going to the rye and seriously expect from the fate of ... "the whole piece of calico, a scarlet ribbon to braid, belt, white shirt, belted in the hayfield." All of that, she wishes no longer for herself but for her daughter. Her daughter's happiness is the happiness of her own.
    Does this mean the daughter's happiness is greater than the mother's? A question again needs to be corrected. You cannot compare the joy of youth with happiness in old age. It is quite different both in form and content. The same can be said about love or "pity." A child loves his mother and other relatives. A boy suddenly begins to feel sympathy toward a stranger of the other sex. Finally, the sympathy goes into either an incomparable feeling of love or an irresistible desire into something sublimely tragic. The complexity and drama of this moment are in a fierce conflict between the spiritual and physical, high romance and mundane reality. This contradiction is resolved with a long, almost ritualistic premarital period and the wedding ceremony.
After the wedding, love (compassion) is reborn naturally and becomes qualitatively different, less vulnerable and more thorough. From unfathomable celestial heights, the romantic feeling was tearing down, falling on hard ground, but the marriage bed, prudently stockpiled by life, softened the blow.     
    The birth of children has almost always completely dispelled a sublimely romantic haze. Compassion (love) between the spouses of each other became rougher and more profound. It was fastened to the overall responsibility for children and universal love for them.
 After the birth of children, the couple sometimes kept some of an adolescent's lofty attitude that was not condemned but not very much encouraged by public opinion. Families without children are no families. Life without children is no life. If one year after the wedding, in the house does not yet creak the crib and slatted swinging cradle, the house is considered unlucky. The wedding, in such circumstances, remembered with some bitterness and then tried to quickly forget about it. Childlessness is the greatest misfortune, entailing humiliation of women, fake relationships, rudeness of men, and adultery. Childlessness upsets life harmony and throws off the rhythm. One unnatural causes another, and the house gradually becomes a scourge.
     Nevertheless, childless families are only sometimes destroyed. On the contrary, spouses honouring the sanctity of marriage either adopting children (orphans or from large distant relatives) or bravely bearing "the cross," getting used to the grave and single lobe.
 In a typical peasant family, all children were born primarily in the first ten or fifteen years of married life. "Pogodki" were called children to be taken with a year difference. Thus, even in a large family with ten or twelve children when the last was born, the eldest has yet to emerge from adolescence. This was important because pregnancy, when an adult child is still at home, was not very appropriate. And while no one directly blamed parents for the birth of a sudden "late child," spouses with the maturation of their first child and getting older, the rest of the children were not in such a hurry to enjoy the marriage bed ... They both have gradually returned to youthful chastity. Old age marked not only that.
Even the songs sung at adulthood and maturity were replaced by other, more appropriate meanings and forms. If, during a visit, joining the ring, the mother of an adult son sings about "boyfriend" or "betrayal," no one will take it seriously. Human behaviour is changing with the maturation of children, but physical aging is still very far away. Even a mature woman gets a girl's cheeks to blush during the holiday feast, but she cannot dance the old way when looking at her daughter-bride. Father, who just turned forty, still wants to compete or play dice seriously, but he never will because his sons should do it for real.
Under cover of futility, to defend them by a semblance of a joke, and in old age, he can still go to games, go fish perch, and buy his wife fairground candy. But marital status has moved you to the other cases and brings different, diverse entertainment. Love (compassion) for the wife or husband loses something appropriate or needed in their youth but becomes something new and unexpected for both spouses: tenderness, affection, and fear of losing each other. All this is carefully clapping for external roughness and feigned indifference. The couple even slightly criticized each other, and outsiders sometimes need to understand the essence of their genuine relationship.
Only the most talkative and straightforward laid out in conversations all the ins and outs of the family. They often ratted their "half," but it was generally innocuous. Self-irony and a joke rescued people this age, protecting their family affairs from unwary influences. "We sleep together, but money keeps separate" - with a severe look told a man about his relationship with his wife. Of course, everything is just the opposite.