A woman of a certain age revisited

The call of the crisp Autumn day was strong.

Sure there were things to do, but days like this are rare as we measure out the days of our lives.  I answered the call.

Answering Autumn’s call with a drive in the country with no destination in mind was lovely, but now, back to reality. There were still those things to do…undone.

Why not a revisit, I asked myself as I stared into the freezer trying to come up with something I could quickly defrost for dinner?  Frozen slices of meatloaf would do. For the column?  My computer not only produces the words, it saves them and I have 16 years of them in which to troll. I found the following, written in 2005 as I was recovering from the after effects of chemotherapy.

I like it. I hope you do too.

The question arose at my book club: Were there still 17 year old girls inside of us?  The consensus was yes, there were 17 year old girls and 12 year old girls and women of all ages inside of each of us, waiting for the moment to live again.

We agreed that we had added something to each girl that we were, giving us different, perhaps not better, but different ways, to deal with the world. Given the appropriate stimuli, a moment or accumulation of moments, old patterns, old attitudes, desires and aspirations would surface, kind of like my Brooklyn accent surfaces when I’m angry.

I don’t know about the 12 year old, but I liked the 17 year old girl that I was. She was so optimistic, a hopeful, goal-oriented young woman who was telling the world to “step aside, I’m on my way.”  She was happy but not content.  She was full of the unlimited future before her. When that path disappears, it’s hard to get it back.

The repetitiveness of everyday life, so unlike what the 17 year old concept of adulthood was, can be chilling, taking the fire out of your head and your heart. The dance becomes a plodding walk. You limit yourself to the oughts and must dos, a safety of sameness.

Now, there are things that the 17 year old could do that, even with a gun to my head, I couldn’t do now.

Ice skating for one. Then, I had the most beautiful pair of figure skates and would spend every possible minute on the ice perfecting my small town girl’s version of figures. I can see that girl now, up early, down on the lake ice, frozen into waves, practicing before the school bus arrived.

Now, I wear boots with 18-wheel tire truck treads and no heels so that I can make it from my side door to my car.

I also cannot do the twist, and I am cheating here since that dance didn’t become popular until a few years later, but parts of that dance are a physical impossibility for me.

Actually anything that requires extensive knee bending is out of the question. Kneeling at prayer in church is only possible because there is the back of a bench in front of me to help me get up and down. Wearing a bathing suit, now there is a ship that has sailed.

Once I wore a bikini. Given the fact that normal skin unencumbered by the effects of weight loss finds itself heading south under the sultry song of gravity, Bermuda shorts are about as skimpy as I will go now. That 17 year old does have some pride you know.

At 17 I had a rich chocolate brown head of hair. When my hair grows back, and it is very slow in doing this, it will not be brown, any kind of brown.

Of course it hasn’t been brown for 25 years or so thanks to the world of chemistry and my hairdresser. I wore what would be, by comparing my then size 12 skirt with skirts today, about a size six. Now I am a comfy 14. God knows what size that would have been then.

There is a part of that girl that I adore. She could always become excited about what she was doing.  There was always something new to learn, to experience, even if it were just walking down a street that she had not been on before.

Last week, after a long bout with some of the after affects ( I choose affects as well as effects here) of chemo, I knew that I was on the mend.

On my way to Cazenovia to visit my daughter, I took a road that I had never been on before, excited to see if it would connect with Route 20 at some point.

I drove past beautiful farmsteads and slowed down to take in the scenery, enjoying the trip, relishing the small excitement of finding my way on an unfamiliar route. When I got to Cazenovia, I would be the mother again, required by custom and law to be 65, but along the way the 17 year old sang the old songs and was in charge.