lake michigan
Weathering

My face catches the wind
from the snow line
and flushes with a flush

that will never wholly settle.
Well, that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young forever, to pass.
I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty
and only pretty enough to be seen
with a man who wanted to be seen
with a passable woman.

But now that I am in love
with a place that doesn’t care
how I look and if I am happy,
happy is how I look and that’s all.
My hair will grow 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,
it’s little enough lost
for a year among the lakes and vales
where simply to look out my window
at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors
and to what my soul may wear
over its new complexion.

Fleur Adcock

I have a favorite bench that overlooks Lake Michigan here in Evanston, IL. I call it my “eternity bench” due to an experience, I frequently have when looking at the beach, lake and horizon from there. I often sense something that exists throughout and beyond space and time. However esoteric that may sound, that has been and is my experience there.

Reading the poem, Weathering, I am in touch by something similar  — the inevitability of aging, and the something that connects me to everything over all time and to all of us who have the privilege of aging. Like the author, Fleur Adcock, I look less in my bathroom mirror to find beauty or lack thereof, and look more within to find it.

As I live with my own aging process and that of aging clients, I appreciate our weathering, our regrets and joys, as we sometimes fight against and sometimes drop deeply into the eldership of weathering.

About 30 years ago, I knew a woman who had her face lifted and tucked, implanted, slimmed down, puffed up and pulled so tightly that she had a slightly permanent smile. But she couldn’t laugh because her face couldn’t move. At 75, her face showed no signs of having lived.  It was actually quite sad.

I grow to appreciate my wrinkles, and sun spots, and even a little sagging here and there. Those spots tell me how much pleasure I have had walking the lakefront and the seashore, face up to the elements — wind, rain, snow, sunshine. Ahhh, weathering!