Muscle Tone

I passed a young woman in the market this afternoon.

Her skin was so evenly colored. Her muscles so toned.

I wanted to stop her and say:

“Your skin is so evenly colored and your muscles so toned!”

But she appeared to be in a rush.

“She’s decades younger than you,” my husband said, surely relieved that I shared my thoughts with him and not her, and thinking I needed encouragement.

But I wasn’t mourning my youth. In fact, there’s a very good chance that I am kinder to this skin that’s grown mottled and to this musculature that’s grown soft than this beauty is to perfection.

Someday (soon) the gentleness of age and the blush of youth will meet each other inside young women, like those waves that approach each other from opposite directions as they soften toward the shore.

We’ll look on the Aged then like one does a favorite book or sweater, more Beloved because it’s worn; and so Known, we will Love into ourselves–in all ways and shapes, infirmities and strengths and age–even more.

Gravity

Songs arrive as meditations.

And as a result of unflattering dressing room glare.

Inner thighs.
Belly.
The approach of 60, more than 5 years away, but still.

This song.
All month long.
Playing in my mind.
Romancing.
Even.
This.

Turn. It. UP.

Not even summer…

Weeping Beech in spring

Songs about September already make me wince.
The red of the maple buds on the hillside catch in my chest.
It’s not even Solstice yet.
This must be what it is to grow old
To know the ending, inside
the beginning…
To feel the loss
embraced by the gift.

On Turning 55

Michael McGurk

If 50 was raising the timber frame; 55 was me climbing the timbers & tacking an evergreen branch to its peak. (That happened. There was no photo.)

“50 is the old age of youth,” it is said, “And the youth of old age.”

And it’s true. The fifties are all that.

Or is it just me?

I lost Lila at 55. She had more than a dozen grandbabies by then. But with time’s passing, it seems impossibly young to have been taken.

My older sister died last summer at 55 too and just a few years before her—my aunt.

My mother had 2 years on the 2 of them, alive until 57.

Which is to say—While the sun is shining, I’m making hay.

November, like me

A November day, like today, with its deep frost–prisms of light illuminating the cold–is a lot like me as I age, or who I aspire to be, say by 60 or 80–all the fruit, the desire, the harmony fallen away–so that what remains–the stone, the empty branch, the fading blade of grass–is immersed in this stark and exquisite offering–of clarity.