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| September sunrise - no, not a sunset |
There's a never too late writing award for the over 60s, an elder fest somewhere and probably enough silver tagged onto old peoples' events to heat our homes.
In my city library there's also a book display for the 'ageing well' festival. Mmm...crafting, menopause, gardening, birdwatching. I approach a woman on the desk with purple hair. We're around the same age. That stand, I say.....it's so depressing. She keeps quiet. I go on...brilliant women novelists over 60, poets, artists, actors, singers and musicians....composers, inventors and women of history. We laugh. She promises to tell the person who's done the display, gently, that it could be more ambitious. That 'gently' is telling. It reminds me of words I researched for age in the historical thesaurus (a place to browse on a par with an old-style, ramshackle charity shop).
Ripe, wintered, strucken, far, oldish, grey, eld, crusted, long in the tooth, over the hill, grandevous, antiquated and my all-time favourite, badgerly. (Someone once shouted 'badger' at me when the stripes on the side of my head appeared and much of the rest of my hair was still dark.) It appears in a poem in A Friable Earth.
I don't expect to be venerable, but prefer not to be 'struck in years', a wrinkly old soaker. In a list of synonyms specifically for old woman there is old sock, back number, battle axe, old maid, fusspot, prune, old bat. Only matriarch isn't insulting. The most intriguing, and despite its associations, best of the bunch for me has to be pantywaist because it makes me laugh. All those hours when self, autonomy, ambition and reach are abraded, eroded, stolen. I dip into savings. To dip into, as if it's a treat.
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