Cayce-West Columbia News

Aging’s hidden beauty (Page 65)

By Tom Poland
TomPoland.net

No more glory years, a beauty nonetheless.

A junkyard hiding in woods surprised me. Old cars and pick-ups sat at odd angles, a senior citizen social of sorts. The years had extracted their toll. A sedan’s hood was up as if she had died in the midst of coughing. Another sedan clung to a rusting hood adornment that had been her pride and joy.

One sedan sported two hues of paint as if she had dressed in the dark. Pines dropped a straw hat onto her roof only to have a fallen pine crush it. Chrome catching light from a sunny patch of pine straw turned copper, another piece of jewelry fighting Father time. Cataracts fogged her windows.

A blue truck and blue car, each wrecked, sat side by side, their wheelchair-like chassis headed in opposite directions … tarrying in a woodland junk yard that made for a surprisingly sweet setting. Old vehicles with nowhere to go and all day to get there.

Their glory days are gone.

I know some folks restore old cars and trucks till they gleam like new—the miracle of aging reversed. If only they could . . .

We find beauty in aged possessions. That old leather briefcase with its scrapes and scratches possesses character. The bubbles in antique glass amuse us. How handsome that old pew with its cracked wood and rusted nail heads. That table of longleaf pine with its old saw blade marks, how striking.

I’ve seen new furniture purposely dented to create an aged look. We, however, are not objects and we reach a point where the mirror turns against us. All the creams, moisturizers, Botox, lotions, vitamins, soaps, masks, and spot removers fail at some point.

I notice that many women’s social media photo reflects their younger days. Often there’s little resemblance. Sometimes no photo at all. I understand why they do this. Outside of extreme measures, it’s the one sure way to reject aging. Our planet, cast in a universe where stars explode, is a place where we suffer fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and violence at the hands of one another. Millions die in their youth. Death. I suppose that’s one way to beat aging.

We survivors? We fall prey to sunlight, gravity, lifestyle, and heredity. They conspire to rob us of our glory days, our youth, resilience, and allure. Springsteen, whom I once liked, sung these words.

“Glory days . . . Well they’ll pass you by, glory days . . . In the wink of a young girl’s eye, glory days.”

It’s sad, our exile from the youth culture, but it’s not in a wink. It’s a long, slow grind. That’s why I devoted four years—not to writing about women as flowers—but knowing they are flowers. And like flowers they have their season to bloom. Aging compelled me to theme the novel where one passage goes like this. “Spent sunflowers, like old women wearing dirty yellow bonnets, bowed as we passed. Close by a greenhouse burst with fresh gold-green sunflowers.” Old and young in contrast—not sunflowers, mind you, but women.

Long after my roses, camellias, and stargazers’ glory days are behind them something inside me makes me hang on to their dried and withered petals. Only when the last petal falls do I take them outside and return them to the earth.

Each time I see a woman whose petals are falling, I make a conscious effort to deconstruct her face to see her in her youth. My mind blesses her with surgery-free youth. For an instant I see her as she was. Where sunlight has weathered the lustrous skin of yesteryear and wrinkles have scrunched up around eyes of cornflower blue and darkest burnt sienna, I see flawless skin.

What I need to do going forward is to appreciate her wrinkles, age spots, outright withering, and respect her struggles. The crying of losing a loved one, a beloved pet’s demise, her tears that ran like rivers. And I will share her joy of being on a beach with loved ones. I will thank the wrinkled hands that cooked and cared and washed all those dishes, her never-ending battle against gravity and heredity that gave her that stoop, that awkward gait from where she broke a bone.

I just can’t go on but I know this. The late Harry Crews came close to describing the struggle with life when he wrote “survival is triumph enough.” He might have written, “aging is triumph enough.” I write that aging has a kind of hidden beauty. Look for it and you will find it. It’s there.

I don’t include men in my thoughts. I just can’t think of thistles, dandelions, and crabgrass as flowers.

Aging’s hidden beauty

On: December 25, 2024

In: Columns, Community News

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Aging’s hidden beauty (Page 65)

Aging’s hidden beauty

SCDOT Kicks Off New Phase of Carolina Crossroads Project

End of the year tax tips

Columbia City Council Approves New Parking Rates and Policies

Richland Northeast’s Will Wilson is Mr. South Carolina Football

17 New Firefighters Join Columbia-Richland Fire Department

Mullikin Law Firm and Camden-area VIPs ring bells for the Salvation Army

Golf Tip: Maximize Distance with a Longer Backswing

The night I saw Santa Claus

Jingle Bells: the song that started a feud

Teen Killed in St. Andrews Road Crash

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