Words for old and earth

'Pantywaist' is one of the synonyms for old woman that most engaged me when I began to explore language and ageing.
I can see everything the word suggests as I can visualise where 'old sock' comes from too, 'prune' and even 'dusty miller'.
They are soft, material and contain folds where meanings can rest or gather.
The word 'mossback' is harder to understand, but when I read 'badgerly' I think of what a former neighbour once shouted at me when the two bands of grey at my temples began to define me.
The world 'elderling' sounds almost sweet, compared to 'wrinklie' and there are times I wouldn't take exception to being called 'stricken' or 'vintage'.
But one of the words I am perhaps most intrigued by is 'beldam', a switch of letters away from uproar or asylum, and which sounds as if it should come from the French, 'belle dame'. It doesn't, it's a tricksy word and actually according to the OED, comes from the word for mother, extending into 'grandmother', 'great-grandmother', an ancestor....and then the word switches tone and turns into a 'furious raging woman,' 'virago', a 'loathsome old woman', and the all-familiar hag or witch.
I'm in this thesaurus-browsing mood because I'm struggling with a title for the collection in waiting, poems that grabbed the baton from the menopause and try to understand these years leading up to and away from the great signpost of 60.

The collection began with poems picking apart synonyms like 'crate' and then I meandered around the house, picking up loose beads and empty bottles. I found a batch of old letters and as we all do, wondered where time had gone, I sat in the shed at the allotment and I thought about mud. Even the South African poems, which are always there, are about death and time.
But just as 'pantywaist' appeals for its childishness and glimpse into a past of paper bags and brass scales, I want this collection to have a seam of delight and discovery, of 'vintage' rather than 'frump'.
I ended up online with a dictionary of old Sussex dialect, and synonyms for 'mud' (like gawm and slubber) took over from old. I was looking for a crossover beyond the cliches of fossil and oxidated, of musty and crock, but then I began to think about worm-eaten.
I think of the handfuls of compost worms that break down the peelings and egg shells, red, shiny, desirable. I think of the warnings about how few harvests we have left, the soil exhausted. Is this a bridge I can cross? I am in a place I understand. This is is where earth comes in with its old Friesian, old Saxon histories. Is this the earth of beldam or gawm? A place to tread, a stratum, something to cultivate, a place to bury the dead, a lair, a terminal, the opposite to sea...the planet and so on.