"Happy is how I look...."

I still can't believe it when I hear myself saying to a doctor's receptionist, "Yes, Medicare."  Really--I feel like I'm delivering my grandmother to the doctor's office, just doing the paperwork for her.

It doesn't surprise me to give my birth year, 1948--I'm used to that.  But doing the math and saying 65?  Well, that shocks me every time.  I feel like saying 45, maybe 50--but this?

Then there are those unfortunate reversals of the iPhone camera--when I mean to take a photo of someone else (usually Elena these days) and I see myself from the neck up instead.  Who is that person?  Being oldish is new to me.

I notice it every day, little things, just the way we noticed when we were adolescents, so proud of  every little budding sign that we were women, finally! We wanted desperately to start our periods, wear bras, and shave our legs.

Most days I don't feel old, but some days I do, just a little. The legs I used to like showing off I now choose to cover up.  Shorts and high heels, no way. Bones and joints, I've recently discovered, can talk. Bending down to get the mail off the floor is sometimes an ordeal; opening jars is always an ordeal.  I try to get in lines with men checkers so I can ask them to loosen my jars.

Remember when we made decisions knowing that whatever we chose to buy we'd probably enjoy for many years?  Now who (at my age, give or take a decade or two) doesn't at least consider: this could be my last car, my last job, my last whatever? Even if it's not, the possibility hovers.  We notice the ages of people in obituary columns.  So young! we protest--when we see our ages there.

On the other hand, being a little bit old has its advantages.  I love the freedom most of all.  Freedom, usually, from worry.  Freedom to not care so much about the approval of other people.  This is a glorious age in so many ways, a happy time, as Fleur Adcock proclaims in her poem, "Weathering." (I've put the best three lines in bold print.)

Weathering

Literally thin-skinned, I suppose, my face
catches the wind off the snow-line and flushes
with a flush that will never wholly settle. Well:
that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young for ever, to pass.

I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty,
nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy
men who need to be seen with passable women.
But now that I am in love with a place
which doesn't care how I look, or if I'm happy,

happy is how I look, and that's all.
My hair will turn grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake, my waist thicken,
and the years work all their usual changes.
If my face is to be weather-beaten as well

that's little enough lost, a fair bargain
for a year among lakes and fells, when simply
to look out of my window at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what
my soul may wear over its new complexion.