On Age and Attitude: Part 3

Fine wine, Scotch, cigars, patina on fine furniture, cheese…just a few things that come to mind when you think of what gets better with age. In our modern western culture, people are generally not included on that list.

Our physical-self seems to deteriorate. Our faces gain lines. (Those lines start out looking like a roadmap in the desert west, and end up in the east where the roads get more concentrated and convoluted.)

Our hair changes colors. Those colors start out looking like a spring sunrise or polished hardwood, and end up looking like a winter sky.

Our boobs sink. They start out looking like wine glass bowls, and end up looking like a tube socks with golf balls in them.

Our joints hurt. They start out like a colt, running everywhere just for fun, and end up like a desert tortoise, moving only if it has to.

Our eyes quit seeing. They start out with clear pictures, and end up having to ask the server how much the bill is.

Our rapier wit seems to dull. It starts out as quick as a teenager’s smart-ass retort, and ends up like a search through the hard drive trying to bring up the name of the gal you were JUST introduced to.

Although these changes seem profoundly unfair, our real self is getting better and better. Through life’s experiences, we gain friendships and memories, wisdom and a sense of self. We get to decide what is important and what is trivial. We get to travel and visit other places and cultures, adopt beliefs that sing, and discard thoughts that are discordant. We get to love and lose, win and laugh, create and destroy, cry and hurt, wound and forgive.

All of these give us the palette to paint a more colorful portrait of ourselves every day, week and year we participate in life.  Sisters on the Fly has created a culture within a culture, where women of every adult age get to share. We get to embrace a Sister as they age like fine wine or copper. We get to sit at the knee of our more experienced Sisters and learn from their wisdom, their struggles, their wins, and their memories.

We get to hand down the lessons we’ve learned from a life lived fully to the girls who are younger. We have a bond created in a shared love of the outdoors, activity, laughter, and friendship that transcends yet embraces age.

That bond allows girls to feel ageless as they shove their boobs into a bra in order to get them back to where they belong, as they grab their readers to see the check, and as they enjoy a girl-talk with someone a generation and a half behind or ahead of them; the difference in age not seeming to matter, except in that it offers the younger wisdom and the older validation.

Told by Christa Branch, Sister #883