On age and assurance
some women are simply wiser than me
“Your hair is getting silvery,” I say to my spouse Janyce sitting beside me.
It’s about 5:30 in the afternoon on a lazy Sunday and we’ve been sitting on the deck of the Airbnb we booked for the weekend just outside of Brattleboro, Vermont. I’m glad to have Janyce back after two weeks away, but she arrived home with a cold so we are pretty low key for the weekend. We’re hanging out on the rustic deck that overlooks the woods, listening to the white noise of the spring stream as it rushes down from Black Mountain.
We’ve been sipping a pre-mixed rhubarb cosmo that isn’t half bad actually, and staring out into the backyard, leaning into our Adirondack chairs. Lush spring ferns seem lit from within, the afternoon sun blinking between the waxy leaves of the trees. The owner of this cabin isn’t big on landscaping and has left the yard rough and natural, but not without some forethought. A split-log woodpile borders the edge of the yard just before the steep climb of the forest beyond. A solo stove and some log stools surround it. We won’t be here long enough to take advantage of all the touches like these, but sitting here now, we mostly notice the sound. The stream is so loud it even drowns out the birdsong, but not in a bad way. It has the same meditative quality as waves breaking against the shore.
We’ve been talking about our Cape Cod rental just now, discussing how it’s sure to be occupied on a Memorial Day weekend like this one with perfect weather. We’re happy to not be there, though. We both spent our childhoods rummaging about in the woods, overturning logs to look for salamanders, poking into swampy pools with a branch searching for bullfrogs, counting lady slippers in the spring. Janyce has told me many times that she feels most at home in the mountains and woods than by the ocean, and more grounded by the earth than the sea.
“Let me see that,” she says, motioning for me to hand over my cellphone.
“You kind of match the branches in the background,” I say.
I’m annoying her by snapping photos while we sit here chatting. I like how the strands of her hair match the same silvery screenprint on her graphic t-shirt and the pine tree limbs in the background. Aging has only made Janyce more attractive, and more herself.
In Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s new podcast Wiser than Me, she talks to women in their late 60s, 70s and 80s and she ends every episode by calling her mother to discuss the interview, (her mom is in her 90s). It’s one of my favorite podcasts lately, a conversation between two women with Julia’s signature positive humor. It feels effortless and relaxed, but it’s because Julia is such a good interviewer. She isn’t afraid to listen and let the conversation take them in a new direction, to let things stall a bit and veer off topic before she expertly reels it back in again to fit the pre-planned structure. In every interview she asks each woman at the end: Is there something you’d go back and tell yourself at 21?
In People Magazine, with her picture on the cover looking stunning at 62, Julia is quoted as saying, “Older women are very much made invisible in our culture. And that’s tragic.”
I know what she is talking about. I already feel invisible in ways that are hard to explain and I would be lying if I said it didn’t bother me sometimes, but it’s not without some benefits, too. At close to 57, I don’t care if men (and certain women) find me attractive anymore and that is freeing. But I wish that also applied to how I feel about my own body. I wish I was more like Janyce, who walks through the world with a self assurance that comes natural to her. None of that comes natural to me. I learned as a girl how to please other people first, how to put their needs ahead of mine. I don’t think I ever fully learned how to listen to my own body’s cues or to fully hear the encouraging voice deep inside myself telling me what I like, what I want. Do I like the mountains more than the ocean? What would I go back and tell myself at age 21?
I think I’d tell myself not to do anything different and miss out on Janyce. That’s for sure. Every day, every weekend away, every year that goes by, there still isn’t anyone wiser or more fun to be around.
It’s Monday morning and we’re leaving Vermont with our anxious dog already panting and wedged in the back seat beside a bunch of bags. We’re bouncing along on unpaved rocky roads, hazy green hills like enormous shoulders reclining in the distance. We’re making a run for it.
“Let’s hit the highway and try to lull her to sleep. We’ll stop in Bolton and have our salad first and let her walk around,” I say.
“Can we get ice cream too?” says Janyce, before sneezing into her tissue.
“Of course we can get ice cream,” I say. “You read my mind.”
i love the feeling of this.