Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Seeing Old
If you are an old woman right now, your hands have calluses from having righted overturned garbage cans in the alley, changed tires on broken down cars in the dark, carried blankets and bikes up concrete steps, smoothed everyone’s crying faces until the sun rose and it was time for coffee, drunk out of a cup chipped from dropping near the baby’s high chair, the coffee staining your clean shirt, leaving the baby pristine, everything pristine and untouched, because you absorb all the touching and the stains, except, to the surprise of everyone, you learn to embroider the stains into flowers in vases which everyone appreciates and applauds as if you learned this art in a class sitting next to young women with polished nails and assumptions about you being bored with your life and needing a hobby.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
When I was trying to get a TSA clearance for air travel the agent could not get any fingerprints and had to use a more tedious paper way to verify me. He said some women have done so much work their fingerprints are gone!
Really?! I have never heard that. Oh my.
I worked for a mentoring organization that had to run fingerprints on everyone aspiring to be a mentor. Often, older candidates no longer had prints.
I am glad to learn that it was true.
I love that image of soft, fragile old ladies. In the regular world, if you are that soft and fragile, you won’t make it to old.